Just wanna give you guys a heads up in case you skipped to the latest chapter, I just posted three chapters tonight so you'll want to go back and read the previous two first. Thank you.
-Slit-
I still wasn't fully awake, but the feel of her finest fingers dragging along my scars, me, was grotesquely indulgent. Too chrome, but I wasn't capable of saying no.
So they wanted another shot at food and chitchat? Fine, couldn't promise I'd have much to say, though. I didn't really care to get up at this very second either.
"Not yet. Get in here, Psycho."
Dragging her into the car was easy, even without the leg I still had the weight advantage on her so it was all a matter of leverage and enduring her bitching.
"Ah! Why you gotta be so fuckin-forkin' pushy, you big damn jerk!"
"You asked for it! Reaching in here and touchin' me while I'm asleep, like some bat fuck." I rebutted as she wound up crawling the rest of the way through of her own accord, sure to elbow me in the ribs and damn near put her knee in my crotch as she seated herself.
Now she couldn't escape easily or refuse me as I tucked in my remaining leg to turn around in the seat, putting my head in her lap once settled. She rolled her eyes, of course, but the shine hand came. Though, it did not come without hesitation.
"Didn't think you'd wake up, bein' honest. Eh, hoped you wouldn't so I could, uh... Yeah."
"Freak." I knew what she wanted, what I wanted too, so I took her hand and brought it where it needed to go. Naturally, her middle finger swept over the old wounds and around my lower lip.
She always did talk like the torn mouth I had was something of a twisted beauty. Didn't surprise me at all that she'd try to sneak a touch, though I now think maybe I could have snapped at her for doing that when It felt like knives in the wee hours. Didn't matter, wanted it now.
"You know, this is likely to just put you right back out."
"Don't care." The wench had the Scavenger's attention all afternoon into evening, it was my turn now. "Just wake me up again."
Dune seemed to relax into the drivers seat, heel of her boot propped up on the dash, hand wandering around my skull. Sometimes it was only a finger, other times her entire palm smoothed its way over my neck and jaw. When she pulled up at the bottom of my shirt, it was reflex to twitch and go rigid, then I had no option but to melt like wax left in the sun. Soft, rusty touches around a scar still stapled as if to hold closed the gash that had almost bled me out once. Didn't need those chunks of metal for a long while now, but I still kept them in anyway, all but the one Dune tore out with kicking heels the last time we had a good knock down and drag out.
The bruising was finally faded to a sallow color spread out wider than the initial black and purple blotches had been. Usually the filth and dust that floats in the open air sticks to sweating skin in the parched land we came from, which hid bruising well. So did war paint. Damn, that had been a hell of a brawl, more ferocious than the usual for sure. At least most of the bruising and all but the worst of the aches over it were done with. Usually, I enjoyed the ass kicking matches and so did she, that last one was different. I didn't like it but hell, at least she was talking, still talking. I suppose even if it took almost offing each other, it was worth the cost.
That's the thing though, I was that damn close to killing her. Right now, with that hand on me, I wouldn't dream it, but each of us had cheated the other out of blessed death. If she pissed me off enough, would I go through with it? I don't know, I don't think so, I'm not even sure I was ever really going to choke the life out of the scav. I think I just wanted to scare her but it turns out she, a full-life, wasn't afraid to die. That's what scares the fuck out of me.
Her fingers returning north to trace the outline of my mouth ejected me from that tangle of thoughts, praise V8. Like always, my meat and bones did things on their own, I just wasn't fighting it anymore. I had my face turned into the soft underbelly of the loon, felt myself vibrating with a groan that was not pain.
As if to win the discussion and prove that what she said was true, I detected pulling at the longer rope of braided hair she refused to let me hack off the back. She was undoing the ties and pulling the beads she'd put there off the length of it. Oh, you merciless shit. I was dead-ass beat, and my corpus felt like a pool of warm tar. With her fingers playing in that longer hair, I'd be off in my dreams sooner than a war pup with a belly full of mothers milk.
"Ducky, it occurs to a scav that you've only been asleep for a couple hours. We could skip dining out and eat in. There still be the scaly jerky in the car. Aftah that, we pass the fuck out in the back seat."
I liked the sound of that. Yeah. Last night was a bad sleep, if any that was substantial managed to happen. Everything smelled wrong in that old junk heap she came up in, that's not why I slept like crap, but it probably hadn't been helping either. Dune wriggled her way out from under me and clambered out through the open driver side window. Once she was out and waiting by the door, I put my leg on, only bothering to tighten one buckle and the leather strap that snapped on around my belt. I'd be taking it off in ten minutes anyway. Fuck, it ached.
Soon enough, we were trudging along, across the bridge, down the path, down the hill and to the spot where we'd parked. "Where's your spark torch?"
"Side pocket. Vest." She said, and I could hear her loading the rifle as I dug into her pocket for the thing. No chances taken, ever.
The black cylinder didn't want to turn on and shine the first couple times I depressed on the button, had to whack it into my palm once for the ancient batteries to touch their contact points right, then I could see as we neared the car. One quick glance inside, with the help of a weak stream of light, and we could be sure no vagrant had begun to squat inside for the night. Nothing was missing, not that there was much inside the cab for thieving. I wound up popping the trunk to check that the guzz and wet stuff was still there. This, too, remained untouched. Good, now we could just do what we do and tell the day behind us to bugger off. I took one of the jugs of aqua and the folded tarp stowed back there before slamming the trunk closed. With no windshield, it would be cold. Tossing this stained grey cloth over the front end would certainly help that. It was worn thin with age and the eyelets were missing, so we could simply pull the corners in as we entered the vehicle and shut the doors on the tarp to keep an odd breeze from pushing the material down onto the hood. It would stay just a touch warmer in here this way.
Once within the relative safety of the car, there was no light. It was a new moon. The only sound to be heard was the Scav digging around in the glove box for the lizard jerky, after that, the gnashing of teeth as we ate. The interior was still chilled, we could feel each other shiver through vibrations in the seat under us.
The aqua jug was passed back and forth between us once, then, the metal leg came off and I began making my way into the back seat. Took little encouragement to coax the mad scavenger to join me, no more than groping into the darkness and finding her head. I enjoyed this far more than I should, just like the last time I had the nutter sprawled atop me like this, limbs all mixed together awkward but comfortable.
As tired as I was, sleep avoided me as if I was prickled and covered in deadly prongs like a buzzard buggy. The thoughts came from nowhere, well, perhaps not nowhere. Spend all day talking to another failure, you start thinking your way back to before your world turned into a huge, bizarre joke. Nux pulled away because he knew he was dying, I don't get the logic of it, but that's how it went down. What did I do? I either ignored him, or I fucking lost it every chance I got. I punished him for his weakness, snarled at him if he got too close out of spite for just checking out on me without even being a fucking corpse yet. Once or twice I left him behind and hopped on the back of some other driver's rig, happy to lend them my excellence and watch how it stung Nux that I'd leave him in the bloodshed the same way he left me alone even when we were right next to each other. Sometimes, the bickering and bitching got so bad, he'd slug me right in the mouth and shove me out of the shared bunk. Then I'd have to go search out some other spot to drop. Usually, I would wind up in Notch's kip, the more recent leader of the crew Phil was from. I could still remember the old fuck, though not so old as Ace, clear as if it was last night. He'd sit up in his spot, scowl, then point to an open space among the dozen or so others. Some nights, I'd wake up to Nux having followed me there through the dark of the warrens and tunnels to curl himself under my arm, just like way back.
Fuck. If I fall asleep with all of this shit in my head, I'm guaranteed a screwed up dream about it. Or worse, the ones when I'd dream everything was alright, that One Arm hadn't stolen Joe's breeders, Nux had gotten over whatever sickened him, Larry and Barry would be gone and a scar in their place. Everything would be fine. Then I'd wake up, feeling like a big steaming pile of fresh shit.
I could tell Dune wasn't asleep. She was doing some of her fidgeting and running a finger up and down the flames of the spark plug etched into my shoulder, at least the parts of it that hadn't gotten toasted. I had a question, and not enough pride left to bite my tongue.
"Are you ever afraid to sleep?"
She hummed and turned her head so that her nose was under my chin. "No, but sometimes Dune's scared to be awake."
"Green shit?"
"Yeah. It's Nux isn't it? In yir dreams?"
I felt myself scowl at that, it's shameful to still be so damn torn up over that slag who threw in his chips with a bunch of busy body breeders.. "Yeah."
"C'n you tell Dune more about him? Been curious for ages... Tell her what you an' him we're like when you were little."
Can't do that, it would only make the business of sleeping worse off.
"Eh, tomorrow maybe." Weird, I left the possibility of actually continuing that conversation with her wide open. Gotta get my head off the filth so I don't wake up swingin' again. "Tell me somethin', anything. Just yap, I don't care. Gotta get that shit out of my skull."
She shifted atop me, turning her head to look at me I think, although there wouldn't be enough light to see. "Er, what's a Slit wanna hear about?"
"Anything. Doesn't matter."
"Hmm... Dunno what Dune wants to talk about." She moved a bit and I had to adjust too because the woman was all elbows and kneecaps. "I s'pose, could tell ya some things about some... stuff."
It started pretty usual, a little muttering of some less than funny jokes. She talked about how we needed to find something to fill up the maggot farm on the way back, also that the bones and gunk needed to be cleaned out. I took that opportunity to curtly remind her that it was her turn to do that, then she mentioned, randomly, that I'd probably have wound up a crow fisher if I had come up here. That demanded explanation.
"...Ah, huh. Right. So, us Vuvalini were basically militant feminists to the point of un-feminism. At least that's what mum always said."
"Ah, what's a feminist?"
"Not sure. Mum made it sound like there were two different kinds but Dune could never tell anybody apart like she could. Granted, Dune was twelve when we left here. She said a lot of things this scav couldn't fathom but she left those words here, never brought it up again... Mum was a bit of a trouble maker, see. According to her, it was a real shit show when she dragged home Pa an' his broodlings. Everyone just about lost their minds an' she had to remind um that she grew up with a ma an' a pa, not just a ma. Men were rare among us. Bad boys get sold, good boys get to stay and plant seeds. Boys who just weren't quite good enough, didn't respect and fear enough, they were given to the crow fishers. Dunno, if you were born here you mighta been too mouthy. Heh, Mum always used to tell Dune 'If my child had a pecker, even the crow fishers wouldn't want her' but it was with a laugh, loved me anyways. Dune was always too much. Too loud. The older brothers could never get away with that, maybe at home they could jus' be but... Not around the others. Boys walked a thin line, like a tight rope, an' it's too easy to fall."
Something about that, it got me thinking this shit could be part of why Ardith was such a rotten pain in the arse. It also smacked of home somehow, but in screaming reverse. Might be harder now to sleep than it would have been before she started talking. I was curious the day before about her history, now it was reminding me of random fragments of my own.
It wasn't that wild to consider that these people who used to live around here might have been just as segregated by sex as we War Boys were back home. Only those who were next to the gods could so much as look at a breeder, which we weren't allowed to even discuss to begin with, but it made my skin crawl a bit.
Just go ahead and sell off half the next generation, that's fine right?
I could taste the sarcasm in my mouth at the thought, but the truth that followed it in my head was just as uncomfortable. It was perhaps only an itchy, nasty feeling thought because I'd spent the last seven hundred plus days living with a woman. One that could, in my opinion, hold her own among the Immortal's Half-Life children.
When the milk mothers had sprogs, where did the girl ones go?
I had never asked myself that question. The boy ones were brought to the scrawny little twerp named Nanny and a few others to be raised up on daily deliveries of mothers milk until they were old enough to be integrated into litters and initiated as war pups with a brand and white clay. But what of the girls? Joe and his Imperators must have done something with them.
"...c- can we talk about something else?"
"Oh," She shifted once again and I felt her scar fingers find my chin. "Sure thing, Duck... Hmm, what else is there. Ah, huh."
I had an idea of what I wanted to hear, wasn't sure how she'd feel about it, though. "Like to know more about your brothers. Don't have to, jus' sayin'."
I didn't want to hear about what happened to them, well, that's a lie. I wanted to know that, but I knew for sure that the nutter didn't want to talk about it.
"Ohh, them," I could hear the apprehension there in her voice, to delve into the way back of her head and locate the memory. She was fidgeting again, too.
Shouldn't have asked, I'd seen the way she went all rust headed the last time they were mentioned by the Crow Fisher woman, and how she started seeing shit on the way here when she offhandedly said something about being raised with siblings. When did I start caring how the maniac felt about anything? Maybe it was a slow rise, something coming to a head here, in this filthy swamp.
The urge was strong and humoring it was a sin, but my hands wanted to move over her spine and try to make whatever demons I'd woken in her head fall back into their slumber. I did what the flesh and bone asked and she was still for a moment. I didn't expect her to talk any more.
"They were strong. They used to carry Dune around on their shoulders." As if to drive the words home, she squeezed at my shoulder with the act of recalling, or maybe to make sure I was listening. "They only spoke at home, almost never around others unless spoken to first and a thousand times over never did they open their gobs around the elders. They knew the consequences... This scav used to speak for them, 'cause them old bags wouldn't throw the book at a girl. Rus was older, but Flick was taller. Us girls liked them around because Flick could reach the best juicy delicacies out in the orchard. I liked them around 'cause they were my brothers, an' I loved um. Heh, Rus used to make this silly voice whenever Dune was sad..."
She kept going. Dune talked about her brothers and them alone for so long that she talked herself to sleep. A lot of it I didn't understand, the vernacular from here is different, but I knew an awful lot about her brothers now, down to the clothes they wore. They seemed wild when it was just the three siblings together in the stories, wary when they were with others. The older siblings liked to build dirt bikes and would try to motorize just about anything for kicks. They once glued a spoiler to the shell of a tortoise. I've only ever seen their empty shells, never one with the animal still in it. Dune had to describe it to me, and I had a laugh when she said their heads and necks looked almost phallic. I said 'they sound like a bunch of dickheads.' and she laughed too.
When her jawing quieted to mummers, barely audible, I let her trail off and eventually her dead weight and snoring clued me in that she was out for the night.
Still, sleep was hard for me to catch, and fuck I was exhausted, but it wasn't impossible to achieve. There was a trick I'd learned a long time ago from an Imperator leading a small war party on a two day journey to raid a northern encampment. Nux and I were with the party. For some of the boys, that had been their first call to war, and they couldn't rest. For some reason that particular Imperator felt compelled to make an announcement, daring more than advising the boys to try a technique that sounds like a heap of B.S.
Apparently, if you lay still, close your eyes, and put all of your will into not moving a single muscle, you will eventually fall asleep. Typically within fifteen minutes of committing to the decision. I was surprised to find that it worked, it didn't always encourage a good experience in your dreams but if you need sleep in a pinch, that can do it. And it did, this time.
I dreamed, and it was a strange one. I was looking down at the Razor Cola, a sad, burnt shell. She was still warm although the smoke had cleared and the embers cooled.
There was blood in the sand around me. More came in rushing flows, it was coming from me. My chest hurt. V8 it hurt. You're not supposed to feel pain in dreams, people say that but they're wrong.
It was a hole, punched right through the center of my chest. Where's my blood pump? It should be right there, but there's only that ragged hole and hanging threads of gore holding charred skin together like a flimsy barrier between my insides and outsides. The red kept coming, pouring through my fingers, from between the splits in my ruined face, filling up the leather socket of the metal leg.
This is too much blood, but for some reason it didn't spook me. The hole was just there. I could stick my fingers in around the edges and feel how wide and how deep the yawning cavern in my flesh was. It didn't hurt any more or any less as I explored it. Once more, it was just there, and no matter how much I bled, I didn't die.
I wandered away from the wreck, not too sure where I was going. Not the Citadel, nothing back there for me. Maybe I should head that way anyway. There was a pileup in the canyon after they killed Joe, right? Maybe I'd find others... No, didn't want them seeing me like this.
I just kept walking, unsure of where I was headed. I didn't know where I was, but you can't be lost when you have nowhere to go.
"Oh, look at your sorry face. That must have hurt."
Dune?
I looked up from the sand under my feet, finding her there, not looking at all like herself. Her skin was coated in layers of ash. Clothes weren't right either. Everything was off. She wore a linen frock which matched the chalky grey of her flesh, not white like a wife, and it was aflame. My scavenger wore a cloak of fire and gazed with dead eyes. If I looked at those eyes, the reflection in them showed me things growing from the sand, her visions of green shit.
This is so wrong.
Dune had a hole in her chest too. I could peer inside it and see that there was an ignition cylinder stuck in it. The key hole was spewin' hot embers that stung my face.
She thrust her hand at me, palm open and turned up, as if she expected me to place something into it.
The dream was interrupted by the sound of someone walking around us- no, Around the car. I jerked awake under Dune, who barely stirred. There was no time to consider whatever the fuck that dream might have meant.
There was something just outside, the sound of boot treads on the damp dirt, and I could see light setting the tarp aglow from the other side. It could have been a thieving wretch, a buzzard, another Crow Fisher who was less open to the idea of outsiders. Could be anything. I allowed my arm to fall off the nutter, down off the seat, then under to search out the hidden pistol with questing fingers. The moment I saw a face peering in through the window opposite of our heads, I had lifted the weapon and flicked off the safety. It was just Phil, the lamp he held illuminated his face just enough that I could recognize him. He peered in for a moment more as I lowered the business end of the lead spitter, and he seemed to nod before moving off, toward the short bridge linking the hills.
Just then, the thought came that neither of us remembered to let the Redhead and her male harem know that we wouldn't be turning up for food. Phil must've gotten curious, but I can't claim to know what goes on in deserter heads.
Sleep came for me again more easily, though it wasn't as deep as before. Now every noise made me twitch. The car had been a bad idea, this was too open a space to park it then try to sleep in it. The familiar stink of us lingering in the seats only offered a false sense of security.
-Dune-
I woke to Ducky jolting under me and the sound of his revolver firing off some lead. That had me whackin' my head hard off the roof as I shot up.
"GAH!" Two people had uttered the same guttural voicing of shock, the echo I'd heard had been Phil.
"Damn boy! It's a rare clear sky, I just came to wake your sorry skin before you idiots roast in this fucking hot box!"
I turned to look, didn't see blood, just brown eyes encircled in whites opened wide as the big blue sky behind him. Duck must have either missed for fired a warning shot. If the former he'd claim the latter. Either way, I was woken with a bang.
"I've been living in fucking scavenger central for the last seven hundred days! Don't be fuckin' creeping around the car like some thievin' buzzard if you don't wanna piss lead!"
"Quit your bitchin' pup! I came to collect this rattlebox. The deal, remember the deal?!"
"Yeah yeah, whatever. Should still know better."
"Eat my ass, Scav Boy."
"Hey, think twice, asshole."
They were both bickering and growling now. Maybe it's a Citadel thing.
"This something ya learned in Scav Country too? Tradin' paint in back seats? There's better locations for that, mate."
Slit was snarling and wriggling out from under how I'd been sitting astride him, climbing over the seat into the front. I could hear him jerking his leg toward himself and fiddling with the buckles. I was confused at the way they spoke. Trade paint? Rattlebox?
"There ain't no paint to be tradin'." Slit muttered.
"Sure. Move over, I wanna put my hands on the wheel and feel her out, get an idea of what she needs." Phil said, pulling open the driver side and practically shoving Slit deeper into the car as he made his way inside.
It was odd, for all his protesting Slit submitted to the older man. Odd, odd, odd. Maybe it was Phil's experience with mechanics that had Slit scooting aside. Arddie had told me that her man was a master of this science. One thing about Slit, part of why he was alright to have around, if I was better than him at something, he usually shut up and let me have that task. For me, it was really only shooting and salvage. Anything else he shut up about was because he was too lazy to do it. Maybe that logic applied to everyone he'd known.
"Ah, she's bog standard for sure, but the arse on these old Chevys! Mm, that back on her would make a nice lancer's basket. Bet you cracked a fat one when you found this old girl." The eldest in the car enthused as he turned the key in the ignition.
Slit seemed to squirm a little, taking a glance over his shoulder, passed me and out the back window. "I've had the thought."
He caught my gaze before facing forward once more, cringing a bit when our eyes met. Now it was Phil who looked back at me. "Oh, uh. Ard wants your help with a few things, says you need to get caught up."
"Oh," Was all I said. I was still groggy and getting over the suddenness of waking.
I had a wicked case of déjà vu as Phil pulled out of the parking spot and took the winding hills the long way around to bring our lovely rig to his garage. Navigating was never a simple feat here. Him and Slit kept on poking each other in the nose with their hot-head banter. A few times as I watched them, I thought they might begin to bloody each other up and that made me reach for Mama's gun. Arddie appeared at my side from the nothing at just the right moment to stop me from taking aim at Phil when the man shook a wrench at Slit in a way that made me a little leery.
"They'll be fine, probably." She offered as I was tugged by the sleeve around the house and down off the well beaten path. "Left the kids with Bones. He'll look after them. Time we revisited things, the important stuff."
Days passed, and each was the same. We'd walk, talk, remember. The orchards were gone, the only evidence of their existence being dull stumps where the trees had been hacked down for firewood. The crow fishers had moved into the places that the many mothers had dwelt. Some were of the Vuvalini, too stubborn to cut away their attachment to this place, so they began to eat the birds, they joined the stilt mongrels who roamed the bogs at the fringe of what was once good. They turned their eyes away from me, as if they sensed my judgment. I had mixed feelings. Mum always pitied the fishers while the old ones always scorned their birth designation. If only they had been daughters they'd said so often. I realize now that I had grown up confused about it all. What's the difference? We're all just meat and bones and hunger, for that is what it was truly like outside this place. In Scav Country, if you're alive, you're hungry. Hungry for guzz, hungry for water, hungry for food, hungry for companions, hungry for shiny things, starving to death. There's nothing else. Maybe we were out of touch when we lived here. Reality hurts so damn good, and the past is so sweet that it leaves a bitter aftertaste. Still, it was nice to walk and talk with Ardith.
I got to know her children, and something about this carried the whisper of hope. Like the others, Ard was once devout, born of woman and made with seeds placed in a cup at her mother's request. Now here she is, rearing two boys and a girl and an adopted teenage son. I swore, once, that I saw Bones and Featherknife mackin' on each other. So, Ard's life wasn't standard by any measurement, not by Vuvalini ideals, not by before times norms, it certainly wasn't how I'd live my life, but it was still perfection. I could see them all together and happy. That was enough to know, Ard was happy, she wasn't going to trade away her boys when they reached the proper age as our predecessors once had with their young. Together and happy for all their days. By thinking about this, I missed Ma, Pa, my brothers. I missed the idea of family.
Arddie came with me to visit the graves again, and it was there that she did something that I hadn't in years, and still wouldn't. It was like she had stolen something out of the air and pulled it to her breast bone, just over her heart. Saving a memory of the dead. Sometimes I felt it was best to forget. I'd clung to Mumsy for too long, and I had plenty of memories. There's no time for remembrance in Scavenger Country save if you live among the dead. I no longer did. No more excuses.
"What happened to her. How did your mother die?"
-Slit-
Phil was being a little too generous about this deal, now talking about the fact that Shirley needed a brawler bar on the front end and offering to hook me up because he had "extra materials". I knew what he was doing, what his ulterior motive was. He wanted to know more about the current condition of the Citadel and occasionally broached the subject with small correlations between the then and the now. A large part of me was still evasive about the topic out of sheer spite, but some much smaller portion of me was just being shrewd. Over the time spent sifting through the dust and helping Dune grow her shit collection, I learned to know better than to give up anything too quick when the recipient is willing to pay for every hint of reward. Maybe I'm a bitter shithead, but neither was Phil wrong about how bare and unpolished the car was. Shirley had an engine that worked, and that was the only thing about her worth any real praise. Any improvement to that would be more than welcome.
It had been a few days. Work on his crow wagon and the Impala was somewhat simultaneous. Parts would scatter and mingle, but we both knew which pieces belonged to which chariot.
Procrastination about the work the interior desperately needed couldn't be entertained any longer, not with Phil's constant prodding at my only source of pride. Out came the back seat and I told the old bastard he could have it for whatever. He took it, muttering something about family seating as he dragged it into the back room full of machining equipment.
When he emerged, I was busy scribbling out plans on the floor boards for the interior. I wanted to install an auxiliary gas tank, which I planned to do once the nutter and I were back home in scavenger land. There were a few things she had laying around that could serve the purpose. One of the kegs she stored cola overflow in could be sacrificed. The only concern was trading to Wilson so I could use that welding torch of his. Sure, it could be done here, but eventually Phil would run out of patience and realize that we were both knowingly playing each other for all we were worth. Felt just like home. I considered that we might have to come to blows to sort that out, too. I wondered how much War Boy we had left between the two of us.
He returned to the outdoor grease-pit, and I felt a finger jabbing at my arm which I lifted to swat at him, but he was pointing passed me through the driver side window at something in the fog.
"Somethin's up." He grumbled a little too close to my good ear.
Not that fucking deaf.
I strained to see through the mist, I heard before I saw. It made sense that he'd hear it first, what with my right ear being useless. The nutter and her gal pal were having some kind of disagreement.
"...Because she doesn't want to fucking talk about it?!" That was Dune's shrill, throaty bitching.
"Oh c'mon, Dune! I'm sorry!" And that was the harpy doing her usual dog like yipping.
"Just... Dune needs air. Air is all she needs." She shouted back, making her way across the bridge while Ard stopped midway with slumping shoulders.
Didn't take much wit to know that the woman had pushed Dune a little too far for history. Dune was always so tight lipped about it unless, it seemed lately, if she started yammering about it on her own, at which point you could maybe ask a question or two and get an answer. Couldn't scorn her for needing to be in the mood for gut spilling, when is there ever a right mood for it, though?
She was headed our way, eyes fixed on me through the dusty side window, so I removed myself from the vehicle and waited for her to meet me. Didn't give a shit what Phil thought of a move like that, waiting for her to come tell me what she wanted. Hell, he answered to the redhead, at least my excuse was that Dune was a inveterate biter.
She stopped by the edges of the tallest pile of scrap parts, nudging a muffler back toward the heap.
"I'm goin' rummaging." She said with a cringe that she quickly turned into a grin. She was doing a shite job of trying to cover up whatever that hissing and spitting with Ard was about. "Be back shortly, jus' need the lead slinger before I go."
She was moving to get around me and into the car to fetch her rifle from where it sat on the remaining bench seat. I was closer and had something to say about this idea of hers. I leaned into the drivers side though the window, lifting the Enfield and holding it tight enough that she couldn't quite pull it from my grip without putting some real effort into it. It stayed in my hands and she looked to me with brows dropping low over her eyes and making them appear dark.
"You think you're going on your own then?"
"Yeah? What of it?" She shot back.
I could tell she wasn't in the mood to be told she couldn't go, and I felt for her in that way when you know you'd be decking somebody if you were told the same shit coming out of your own mouth, but it was just too damn risky. A couple months ago I'd think nothing of letting her do a wander, hell it always gave me a few hours of peace, but now days she was liable not to come back.
A glance at Phil, and his jerk of the head to tell me to get lost was all the more indication I needed to know that he understood I was leaving to keep an eye on the lunatic for a while. Though, he probably read a lot more into this than I'd like. He also tossed something my way, which I had no choice but to catch on reflex. Dune told me it was a geiger counter. Looked a bit like the thing that the spark boys back home carried around, but no cords and needles to check how deadly the charge of lighty power was.
So, we were off. She led me down paths worn deep by a thousand feet before ours, explaining on the way that everything was once framed in by green that no longer existed. When I asked where we were going, she said we were going to wander toward the town that had been adjacent to this place in the times much longer than just The Before. She told me her mother was born there, but I wanted to know how long the walk was going to be. She only held up her hands in a way that told me she wasn't sure.
"Long enough for the sun to move a few knuckles widths." She said a paces later. She followed that statement with a warning. "We need to stay on the higher paths. The stilt walkers avoid the muck in some places with their long legs 'cause in some spots it makes the counter chirp. That's the stuff that gives you lumps. Or bad seeds."
"You think radiation is why wretched pups at the Citadel come out all bumpy?" I asked, and she looked back and sighed.
"Perhaps. They say in Scav Country that the people there came from all over for the water. Maybe they came from the places that went kaboom at the end of times. Who knows. Been almost fifty years now since then. They mightah brought the sickness with them."
Her mother must have told her about the end times. I was inclined to believe it. Dune had never lied to me, forgot to tell me things, sure, but she'd never told me anything but what she thought she knew.
We walked and walked. Dune showed me how to use the thing in my hands and sometimes it made noise and read out a number, so she'd have us turn another way. We never made it to that town she talked about. It seemed that this place was unpassable according to the geiger counter. This place she said we could not cross, I swore that the war parties had driven across the very stretch of it when Immortan Joe was leading us in the pursuit for the wives. It was endless flat mud beyond the hill we stood on. Toxic Lands she called it. Joe led us across Toxic Land. I Wondered if he knew, if he cared.
We just meandered along the hill of damp dirt after finding that we could go no further. She told me that it wasn't like this before. The days we had taken to wandering back in the scavenger lands, Dune would have filled the silences with her singing, but not now. She only looked around, dragging her fingers through the beaded pleats of her hair and letting the corners of her mouth be weighed down. She was just standing there, arms lifted, hands resting behind her head and fingers intermingled as she watched the sun roll toward the horizon. I didn't know what to say, so I played with the loose dirt under the foot of the metal leg.
I was busy watching her and just feeling the resistance between the dirt and by extension, my stump. I was somewhat amazed as I looked down to find something that glittered like chrome in the darkness of the wet soil. Naturally, I pulled the knob of the leg so I could kneel and pick up the object.
"What is it?" I heard from over me.
Dune must have seen me bend down to find out what the thing was, coming over to see herself. I scrubbed at it with my thumb and turned it over in my hands.
"It's a set of keys." I said once enough filth fell away to reveal it.
"What'cha think it goes to?"
Well, one of them definitely belonged to a car. The rest of the metal hanging from the ring was debatable. Just rubbish no one had used to lock anything in an age and a half. One item hanging from the ring needed a little more cleaning to make sense of. I wiped it off with my shirt, still unable to understand it, and held it up to the scav. She could read, I could only be bothered to read a couple words at a time.
"I love my pontiac. Theres a bunch of numbers and a gibberish after that. Car dealership? What'cha think that means?"
Dealership? Ace talked about that once within earshot of me when I was shorter. According to him, people used to buy their wheels from big parking lots full of shiny newborn cars with nothing special about them besides their brand new smell. And then he'd go on and on about the smell of new.
"Somebody told me once that people used to get their cars from a lot way back. Might have something to do with that?"
"Huh, how curious. I wonder where the car is." She said.
Well, if the keys were here, the car must be somewhere nearby. The driver's carcass might be nearby too, but I didn't mention that. We walked again, along the hill of silt and dirt and listening to the geiger counter tell us how safe it was where were were going. I swung the keys round and round on my finger, liking the way the weight of it felt on the digit.
She was the one to spot what could possibly be the car which went with the keys, calling to me and showing me what she saw at the bottom of the hill, sunken into the muck. Only the back end of the car stuck up, I couldn't tell what the model was from that end, I was better at telling from the shape of the grill and the configuration of the headlights.
"Think that's it?"
"Maybe."
"How sad, Duck. I wonder of there's bones in the driver seat. Shame for the car too."
"Yeah. Engine weight must have sucked it down. It's useless now."
She shifted from side to side, face twisted up. "My guts are grindin'."
Ah, but I was bright enough to grab the last few crumbs of lizard jerky from the glove box of the impala before we left. We sat and shared that, sitting on the remains of a wooden shed that had blown over at some point. There was nothing under the boards to scavenge, but it kept our asses dry at least.
Like we might have done around her home territory, we laid back and stared at the sky to wait and digest. Her shine hand found its way to my face as she lifted her arms over her head and felt her way around my own.
"Yir gonna be sportin' a beard soon."
She was right, I'd been putting it off. It stayed cold here in the morning and only warmed a little by noon, so I was reluctant to get rid of the insulating bristles. Those hands would feel much more chrome on a clean face, though.
"Later." I answered. I'd find a blade sharp enough to do the job and the grease to keep from shredding skin once we went back. I'd left the razor and fixings at her kip.
Hmm, I wondered how long she wanted to be out here rummaging for nothing. She must've been real sore with Ardith if she was willingly detached from her hip before the setting of the sun.
"What were you an' the redhead buttin' heads about?"
She grunted out a short reply. "Shit that can't be helped."
"Ah." Not hard to translate that into truth. "You should probably talk to her about it."
"Don't care to."
Stubborn wench. Did she really think she wouldn't have to deal with her crap once she was here? Well, her reluctance to come made sense if she just didn't want to face whatever it was in her head that made her, her.
"I might be just some fuck-up from the Citadel, but at least I've got the sense to admit unloading my shitty cargo was probably healthy."
"Oh kiss my arse, Slit. I never said you HAD to do that if you didn't want to."
"Oh, I see how it is. Suck my fat cock then."
"You wanna watch your tone, are you asking to be de-balled?"
"Why can't you talk about anything but shooting people and throwing long pig in the maggot farm?! Huh?"
"Because I have NOTHING else! I AM nothing else!"
That isn't right. She was contradicting things she used to say all the time, way back at the beginning. When did that change? When did her high flying sense of self worth plummet so fucking deep into the pits? I swear, she once told me that we're not nothing. Her hand was still on my face, maybe she didn't realize what she was doing but her nails were digging in, stinging half moons into my cheekbone. Had no choice but to jerk my head away and sit forward to turn and look at her. She'd sounded pissed off as we argued, her snarling teeth said plainly that she was still pissed, but her eyes were all wet and dripping down the corners. The wasted salt and cola seeped passed her hair line at the temples.
Oh V8, please don't fucking cry. Bite me, slap me in the face, call me a stinking hog. Anything but this .
She wasn't like this before the sandstorm, she never walked in her sleep, she never bawled her eyes out, she never said she was nothing. Dune had once said she went back to this place when she was nailed by the lightning, like a second bolt of crackling electricity, something occurred to me. Whenever she got up out of her sleep spot and walked, she went East, as if she had some internal compass which oriented itself to point here. She was always trying to come here, in a fugue state, to realize a bizarre return migration home.
"It's because you were alone so long, because of losing this place and your place in it, isn't it?"
I was projecting, I wouldn't realize that until years later.
"I can't talk about this! I can't!" She wailed deafeningly and without warning, teeth grit and hands clapped over her ears.
I knew what I had done, my guts twisted and I had this sensation like my bloodpump was about to drop out of my arsehole, but I just could not fucking shut up.
Anger tries to conceal fear yet again.
-Dune-
He looked at me like he was seeing something crawling out of his nightmares. That and pity. I didn't need pity. No no no. I needed to escape this talk of mum and the time between her and Slit. It's too big a gap. I can't.
"No- I mean. Fuck! I don't think I've ever been alone for more than twenty damn minutes to take a dump before winding up with you. I can't believe you're still alive! You think living alone for six fucking years isn't worth talking about? You think it didn't do some kinda damage?"
He sat up as he ranted, pulling away from me. Recoiling. He was recoiling from me, because I'm crazy, because there's proof of it everywhere, because it's what any sensible person should do.
"I DON'T KNOW! I don't wanna talk about it!"
Things were getting itchy, ugly, and the green was springing up all over. I could see it crawling through the bog, across the junk pits, roots diving into the earth under us. It even crawled right over Slit, reaching out to me with flailing vines looking for something to grasp. I needed to go, the tension in my legs and hands told me to get up, to run. Mum was calling, I could hear her but she wasn't beckoning me to come to her, she was urging me to stay put. Soon I was standing, frozen like the morning frost on the surface of the collection pools back at the caverns during the cold months.
I'm fine Mum said over and over, just like at the end, when she was laying on the ground with both hands in fists over her breast bone. I'm fine. I'm fine. Dune?
"Dune? Hey! Stop saying that! Yir freaking me the fuck out!" That was the failed war boy, trying to shout over the screeching inside my skull.
"I'm fine! I'm fine! Stop touching me! Fuck off!"
When the green vanished, he replaced it, grasping at flying hands and forcing me to turn around and face him. I didn't WANT to, I didn't even want to come here!
"No, you're NOT. Look at me!" He was roaring now, so I roared back.
"No!"
"Dune! Stop! Quit scratching!"
He wouldn't let go, no matter how I clawed and slapped and twisted myself against him to break free of his grip. Goddess, just let go! I knew what I was doing, I can't excuse the way I brought my knee to his inner thigh so terribly hard to knock him off his already precarious balance. Insanity isn't an excuse for violence, this much I know. We're all born with a river of rage flowing though us, that's the curse of being human.
He went down, hard, but not without dragging me with him as he scrabbled at anything to keep himself from falling. We went rolling down the hill, cries of pain interrupted only with involuntary gasps. Tumbling over stones, garbage, the ruined past until landing in the detritus of it. We'd broken apart at the bottom of the hill, he flopped flat, face down into the muck. I was flung aside over the trunk of the half sunken vehicular corpse we'd just been musing upon the tragedy of. Oh, the rusted steel bit at skin and bruised the bone what lay just under.
The shock of it! I couldn't breathe, I went sliding down into the muck of the world heaving empty retches and sputtering coughs. Slit was regaining his feet- foot and swinging his arms all a rage that he was soaked face to toes in the black stuff of the rotten earth. It suited him now as he flung it away from himself in splatters and tried to swipe it from his eyes.
He growled, sounded like Shirley drinking up guzz and spitting exhaust fumes. "I didn't come here to scavenge shit and pal around with an old cock-up at the end of his half life!"
"Well, then why the hell did you wanna come out here so bad, Slit? The fuck was the point then? Was this just what you said it was?! To prove your dumb Valhalla is more real? Well I guess you got your stupid wish!"
"To hell with Valhalla! I dragged you here because you got rust in your skull! I thou- Rrrrgh! I thought this would fix it!"
Ouch. Fix it? That hurt. He wanted to fix me, all the more evidence to prove that I was too wrong to ever be alright. Hurt turned to anger.
"What?! You thought I was just gonna go AH HAH and have some kinda revelation?! That's not how it works, Slit! That's not how any of this works! Fuck you!"
"I don't know! I'm trying, okay? I'm fucking trying and I have no fucking clue what to do with my life from here but I'm trying because YOU seem to want me to! And fuck you, too!"
-Slit-
The loon was picking herself up out of the slop, but the way she lifted her head to look at me, It was as if her eyes could blast away my skin like a power grinder.
"Is that your shitty way of telling me you're better off if I stick around?" She growled, deeper and nastier than I'd ever heard out of her before. It was like she was someone else.
"May- Yeah, It is." I admitted, but this is where I couldn't look at her anymore. I can't watch her when she's seeing right through me. "I want to know what happened, to them."
"Doesn't matter, won't bring them back so what's the point of talking about it?! Fuck off. Don't wanna keep fucking living it again."
She grabbed the nearest dead branch out of the sludge, wrenching it free and slinging it away with all her strength. Anger, I know anger. It put a heaviness in the air, thicker than the oppressive humidity and just as smothering. I don't know why I asked this next question. Seemed random in the moment but maybe the truth is that I was looking for common ground, anything that would make this trip worth all of the V8 damned guzz and effort.
"Why do you want to look at my cut-ups. Hmm?"
"I don't know."
"That's not an answer!"
Dune turned to face me, showing her ugly teeth as she stalked through ankle deep mud to come at me looking ready for a brawl, but she stopped several steps short. She ground her teeth and pulled on her hair, frustrated. If I wanted to, I could goad her and it would turn into bloody fists, bruised bodies and aching bones. I wanted her to tell me the truth far more than I wanted a black eye and to knock her on her ass but the fact is, Dune might not even have a reason for anything at all, which wouldn't be a surprise. Dune seldom supplied me with a valid explanation for anything she did unless it was directly related to our immediate survival.
"She don't know! Dune wants to understand you better? She thinks?!"
Good. Back in the third person, usually that meant she was starting to be reasonable.
"The door swings both ways OR, it doesn't fucking swing, Dune."
That came forth more tersely than I'd wanted it, but I was sick of this. I honestly had almost no clue who I was living with. I'd known nothing about her besides how bizarre she was until after that lightning and Wilson's retelling of how he met Dune and her mother. It wasn't fair. She shouldn't get to claw me open and sedate me with her hands if I couldn't know what the shitting hell she was even about. She'd taken every shred of dignity from me when we met, tortured me with her care, humiliated me with unwanted assistance. If I had to live through that, survive her, then she needed to compromise here.
She wouldn't look at me, she just glared at the path of disturbed filth we had created as we destroyed each other again. The scavenger tried to wipe a flow of red from her lip, but only succeeded in smearing herself in yet more of the black glop. She must have knocked her face and bitten her lip on the way down.
"So, yir sayin' you'll show Dune yours if she shows you hers?"
"Yep." Sounds fair.
"Fine. She guesses." She said nothing else, just kicking at the mud and beginning to make her way back toward the hill.
"Well?" I demanded, knowing if I didn't she would conveniently forget that this discussion had been had at all by the time we got back to the crow fisher hovel.
"What?! You want to hear all the hell and shit now? Here?"
I shrugged. "No time like the present."
"You're impossible."
"So are you."
First came a sigh, a tired face with eyes drifting into the nothing while she no doubt suffered another leafy vision.
"Fine. There was this rumor that you could find green somewhere, that there was a river still wet with life an' everything. You'd know you were close when you found a wrecked thing, a plane. Did you know people used to fly? Dune didn't."
The woman pulled at another dismembered tree limb sticking up from the bog, probably so that she didn't have to stand there idly while she recounted this.
"We searched for years, we and the others. We learned things, saw things. Every podunk settlement between the salt an' the canyon, we went everywhere looking for someone who had been there. We were headed back into scav country, the remaining twenty of us. We were gonna chance the canyon, get the hell out of the dust and try surveying new territory-"
The dead wood came up suddenly, sending black globs up onto her face. She spat out what had been flung into her mouth. Never mind how shitty it was of me, I smirked at that. When she caught the look, she waved the arm length stick at me, which splattered new stains onto my slacks, No time to gather a handful of crap and fling it back at her, she continued, prodding holes into the sloppy ground as she spoke.
"We got lost, a storm scrambled us up. We got separated from the caravan. It was just Mum, Russel, Flick, and Dune then. Alone, with a dead engine, only one rifle in working order and not enough lead to put the piss in anyone's panties. The scavengers came, they came for the trailer full of goodies."
She stood for a long moment, still as the stagnant air around this dump. I almost reached out to touch her, thinking she was finished and that now would be a good time to leave before we risked catching lumps down in this shit, but she may as well have exploded, turning and bashing her muddy stuck against the rear bumper of the sunken chariot. Each impotent blow came faster than the last, until her face was red with the blood rushing under the skin, until she howled with a kind of fury I'd only seen once, the last time we fought.
"They didn't come to kill us! They were careful not to! They split us up, sent her brothers to this sin hole called Shatterbone. You don't fucking go there to be sold at that age, with a dick, and have any damn hope of livin'. Shatterbone is for scum suckin' wasteland gladiators. Slaves are just bags of meat for the slaughter there, death for entertainment! We both knew, we knew they'd be dead within a day there! Mum and I... Then... Ugh fuckin-"
"Stop! Stop. I know the next part. You don't have to tell that." I said, thinking it could avert a further eruption of whatever this was if she didn't have to say it.
"How?" She asked, huffing and panting to regain her breath.
"Wilson." I answered, probably foolishly.
"The cuck. He should know better than to motor his mouth. Next time, when I see him I'll knock out the four teeth he's got left!"
"Dune-"
"My whole family is dead! Why am I still here? Why did I live? Why?! What's the good in the Goddess lettin' me stay here!? What's my purpose, damn it!"
This second hunk of wood got thrown too, I didn't know what to say. I never knew she felt like that. My chest hurt, just like when I dreamt that there was a hole in it.
Dune turned then, closing the distance between us and bringing us nose to, well, her nose to my chin.
"You'd be in your Valhalla if it weren't for me."
Crazy as it sounds coming from a war boy, That's when I began to understand why she spent that night a few days back just holding onto me and letting me feel like roadkill in her arms. I couldn't fix this for her, and I was stupid to ever think I could. Well, wish granted, she regretted, and that spite I'd been dragging around behind me for two years was nowhere to be found.
Dune looked like she was starting to sag all over. A trembling hand wrapped in scar tissue rose to grind it's palm into her forehead while she began to sink lower, wobbling and getting ready to collapse into the soggy, sick soil.
I had to hold her up with a grip on either side of her vest collar. It would be a lie of I told you it was just the flesh going through motions on its own when I pulled her in and held her up.
-Dune-
This isn't what I expected. This isn't what I wanted. Needed it? Debatable. I found that I had no tears to give, the desire was there, to fight and scream and shout and cry some more but it was much like turning a canteen spout down to find nothing left inside but a drop or two. Instead I felt like my legs were done holdin' me up, but Slit caught me and pulled me upright again.
I looked at him, and he looked at me. If he was going all pale and sick looking at my sorrow stricken face, I couldn't tell. He was painted black in the muck.
I was soon being squished between the slippery mess of his front side and his arms. Then, I felt all the will to do anything to stop it slip away. If a mean old stink like Slit was doing this, trying to comfort me, I must be in a real bad way then.
Nothing was said after this, he just pulled away and began steering me back the way we came. I don't remember much of the return journey, I just walked with eyes down on the dirt under us as our shoulders touched and I followed. A few times, he'd reach back and grab my hand. I think I know what he was trying to do, maybe trying to make up for ripping this shit out of me, but I wasn't angry with him. I just didn't feel much of anything at that particular time and in that particular space. Once physical awareness started to seep back into the forefront of my mind, all I could manage to do was feel filthy. There was mud in every blasted orifice and it was starting to grow dark out.
I didn't want to run into Arddie, have her wondering what the hell happened out here. I just wanted to be clean and sleep.
Before I knew it, the sound of Ard's babies playing and the thump thump thump of someone walking on their stilts was heard, hidden just beyond the realm of our sight.
This woke me from my trance of silence and stopped me from moving any further. I didn't want to be seen this way. Mama's rifle even needed a thorough cleaning after this mess.
Slit paused and all I could see through the thick coat of filth was his eyes, both wonky and clear peering back to ask the quiet questions.
I shook my head slowly as I answered. "Don't feel like answering her prying, Duck."
He grunted, turning his eyes away and scratching at the back of his head. Clumps of drying mud tumbled down his spine as he clawed it free of his hair.
"Go straight across the bridge and wait then." He said.
There was another look exchanged, another question asked without words. He needed to know that I could be trusted to go back to Mum and Pa's and not wander from it. I nodded, I hadn't seen anything but the grey and black of this pitiful place since we clambered back up into the hills.
He gave only one quick grunt before we moved on and split off.
Cold was slithering passed the numbness. All of the feeling was coming back and it felt like too much and not enough in the same space.
I crossed the bridge, soon finding myself looking into the doorway and imagining the darkened room lit by oil lamps. There used to be a round table by the door, one leg was too short so we had to slide a coaster under it. There were bunk beds made from old pieces of scaffolding in the back of the container where Rus and Flick slept. I used to sleep in a hammock made from an old net. Ma and Pa slept on a mattress which got propped up on the west wall during the day. The gramophone always had something playing, mama loved her jazz.
Now the place was just a space where these crow eaters stored miscellaneous shit, felt like I fit right in here so I sat and waited as I had been told.
To be clear, I set myself upon the floor, not the skinny little cot. The matter of a messy bottom from flopping about in the mud made resting it a tricky business without soiling something.
What was I here to wait for again? Well, I could guess at what Slit was doing, and my theory was fairly spot on. He showed up with a bucket.
Wash water, probably already twice used by others. Still, wearing the grime of other bodies is better than being absolutely smothered in the grunge of the dead world.
"We didn't bother to bring any other threads, did we?" He inquired.
I sighed. No, we didn't because I didn't think we'd be here this long. "You know me, a fistful of bullets and a clean pair of grundies for each is all I usually bother packing."
"Found the grundies under the seat when I tore that out this morning." He mentioned, setting down the bucket and emptying his pockets of the rags he'd brought for scrubbing.
We'd have to scrub out what we were wearing in this water once we were through washing ourselves with it, we'd be milling about all but in the nude until once our slacks and tops dried out. Duck seemed to have anticipated that, the toasty covers that had been brought from my kip were dumped onto the thin cot before Slit sat.
Like back home, the every few days ritual began, though much more relief was to be gained in shedding sopping nasty garments. Boots, belts, vests, socks, trousers and the underneath bits all fell into repulsive piles.
Slit had himself turned away from me, would reach around back without turning to dunk his rag and then quickly swipe away his filth in an nearly frantic way. He was all goose flesh, probably eager to pull on what few dry coverings we had and wrap a blanket around himself. That's just what we both wound up doing if I'm to be honest. We sat looking like a couple of cocoons, staring at the piles of grotesquely muddied clothing and mutually procrastinating about washing them. Slit only managed to bother cleaning up his leg, even though he needed it to walk he still had to be told to go do it before the mess dried on like cement. He had been hunched over it with the covers wrapped around his shoulders and head as he scrubbed out the socket of his prosthetic.
I had a thought. I told him what happened to my brothers, not what happened to Mum. Fair is fair and we had an agreement, didn't we?
"Mum's heart gave out."
"Huh?"
"Mumsy, she just dropped dead one day. Said her back hurt, keeled ovah, said 'I'm fine.' then she was gone. That's how she went."
The battle fodder was chewing on his tongue at that, eyes narrowing. He set aside his false limb and settled on the end of the cot next to me. It had been quiet before I went and killed the calm with that honesty.
"That sucks." He said, taking another breath to say more. "Kinda pictured something different what with how Wilson went on. Going out in a blaze of glory type thing."
"Nope, just carked it one morning over brekkie."
It was hard to say, and I caught myself sniffling to hold back the wetness building up in my face again. I hated picturing her like that. Pale and cold on the hard ground.
Now I looked to the battle fodder turned to scav life, it was his turn.
Slit's lips twitched toward a frown as I watched his face. He looked tired as he eyed me, knowing what was coming, it seemed. He hadn't forgotten the agreement, but he was waiting. He wasn't exposing himself, opening that heavy door without being asked to do it. Seemed I had no choice but to push him along. I'm always pushing him along, aren't I? When pushed myself, I only ever dug my heels in.
"Can I see?"
He deflated like a popped tire, letting out air that he must have been holding for quite a bit, but that blanket wrapped so tightly around him shifted. It was a cautious allowance of vulnerability, felt like a sneaky peak at something I shouldn't be seeing as he let out just one leg. He was so careful not to let any thing else be seen now, a fist full of the tattered flannel cloth to conceal his much more private anatomy. Just the one thing, one limb, was stretched out for me to examine. He clearly intended to keep the rest of himself hidden even though I've seen it all before, and I was happy to let him have that.
Oh, it was more than I thought. Like many of his other doodles, it was hard at first to untangle one from another. It flowed together and clashed and overlapped haphazardly in some places. Abstractions of dots and dashes to make lines of patterns in some places, figures in others, then things start to leap out of the maze of flesh to startle you. Things you could recognize in eerily primal ways. Most were still somewhat pink with their newness, although closer to his kneecap they faded to a paler shade.
Scabs that had only begun to flake and fall off told me just how fresh some of these were, the new scarring under the brown and black flecks was taut and appeared delicate like the skin of an onion.
Fan blades, like from my dearly departed sled. Old world hub caps like from my collection. Drippy tear drop shapes falling into a basin. Hands. Dozens of tiny hand shapes, each like a left hand print. How he got them all precisely the same size was a mystery.
"Nothing shine or special. Just stuff to fill space." He said, turning his head so that he didn't have to watch me see it all for the first time.
I peered up from the doodles to observe his face again. He wouldn't look at me and his expression may as well have been cut from stone. My hands couldn't be stayed, so first, my right landed on his shoulder to test it. He tensed, as expected, but he didn't flinch from me. Now, with my still feeling hand, I touched only with a finger one of the scratchings which was cut with clean, straight lines. Broken tools. There's a running theme with them and it made some sense. Many of the things I'd initially given over to him so that he could play and tinker under Shirley's hood hadn't been in the best condition. His collection had expanded a great deal since then, but still some of these busted wrenches and halved sets of pliers were no more than a few months old. Was there deeper meaning in that?
What caught my attention next was what ran down his inner thigh, down down down until just before the meat of his calf. Gears and cogs over the joint, a shock absorber like his metal leg. He shuddered at my finger tracing the lines.
"Hurts sometimes. The leg that's supposed to be all there and work right. From walkin' funny with the metal one."
It sounded like that was supposed to be en explanation for this particular set of cuttings. Hmm, war boys didn't know how to fix their ails, maybe that had something to do with all the scars and mechanical bits carved into their hide. Because they understood the mechanical world, but not themselves. That's what the rumors about his kind seemed to suggest, anyway.
Oh my, Buzzards. Prickly things screaming in their death machines toward his hip. Their path was obscured by the blanket. I remember that day, hundreds back. Buzzards had been skulking through the canyons into scav country. They got a bit too close to where we were camped. We were lucky that night, wedged into a precipice in the crags of the western mountains listening to them carry on in their buzzard speak just below us. It's incredible that they hadn't found our rides, and next us.
I can still remember the feeling as we watched them cook their catch. Slit had been bothered by the unsettling way the smell made him salivate as they spit roasted whole limbs of the war boys they had picked off from the tail end of a convoy. I'd been more worried that my roaring stomach would give away our position.
When they fled from dawn's light and abandoned their dying fire, our shared relief had been palpable. This was a depiction of that scene as they sped away in their deadly monstrosities.
"I remember that." I said. He only replied in a noise of acknowledgment.
My eyes were drawn back to the newest carvings, and the nature of it began to emerge from the still red and angry wound. A stick figure, an X carved over the mouth, and a thick zigzagging line cut from the top of the head to a broken ratchet head at the end.
It was me, and lightning striking through until the legs of the figure became jagged lines as well.
There was something tugging hard on the many strings inside me, with the feeling came realization. I had an inkling of all the meanings these wounds shared. The reason for this infliction of pain on the self. It weighed heavy as a Storm Rider's holy rollin' rig.
My fingers circled the electrified figure many times as I thought, never quite touching the red swells of skin that were still healing. Maybe he would answer if I asked, maybe he wouldn't. I lifted my hand, brushing a knuckle along the wicked tear through the right side of his face. It was only then that he turned his eyes back to me.
"Slit, these ones? When you were talking to Arddie's sprout, you said 'an asshole who deserved what he got'. I always wondered how they got there."
The former war boy couldn't seem to say anything, his brows turned up as if he might have had words to expel.
The right side always looked older to me, messy too. It screamed of a thrashing body and a clumsy hand gripping a dull blade. The other side was different, a newer wound created with a razor. It was a controlled cut which was reverently adorned with things which glitter.
Now, both hands had risen, cradling his jaw whilst my thumbs caressed the corners of those mangled lips and back toward his ears. I knew then, these were unspeakable things. Any willing mention of them was for the purpose of puffing himself up and nothing more than that. To connect them with truth and reality was too emotionally complicated.
"Someone carved your face on the right, didn't they? It wasn't just a joke."
He looked down between us, and I could spy him retracting that leg back into the safety of the woolen covers. He nodded, finally.
"And the other side?"
He made no move to answer, not audibly nor visibly. Now I understand.
He needed the sense of self-possession, and his body is something he holds dominion over. If the world around him was rife with madness, he could do as he wished to himself and no one could take that from him. Pain could be told to come and he could decide when he's had enough.
It's control.
