Well, I wasn't being slapped about the head and neck, wasn't being screamed at either, but somehow I'd rather that than this, being under her hex again for the thousandth time.
"The organic said he'd be dead inside a season. With the lumps getting bigger, needin' blood sometimes..."
I've never opened myself this way. What the hell was I doing?
"Nux?" She asked and I nodded for her.
It was best to keep my eyes down or better, closed. With both of her hands on me, there was nothing to stop the cloth around her from falling into a pile in her lap. She had no shame, and I was still stuck so deep in the warrens of the War Tower that it felt wrong and awkward to look at her with nothing on, always had been. Sure, I've pretty much seen it all what with her topless sun worshiping and occasionally doing the washing buck ass nude but... I didn't get a chance to dwell on that much.
I felt the heat of her face against mine, the cold of damp hair, the pulling of her skin on the edges of my staples as she turned her face into mine.
"So you carved." Her lips were practically inside my good ear. Too close.
I said nothing because there was nothing to say. She was right. That night, when I evened up my face, I traded out everything in my pockets for a quart of what the boys working the stills had brewing for bartering. Then I sat in the Coupe, in Nux's seat, looking into the rear view glass with my kit in my lap. Down went the rotgut, and then I slid that razor in flush against the left corner of my mouth to start the slicing.
It only hurt the flesh, the rest of me went numb. It made my bloodpump run hard and dance against ribs. To go through with it kind of put me back in that place with a warm knife tearing me open.
By then, I knew to clean the blade first, touch it with a little fire so the infection sure to follow isn't too vicious as long as you keep it clean. Stitched it closed myself too, because why not, I knew how. That side was and is proper, following the shape of my skull. Fearsome. The staples were an afterthought, fingers too slick with red to hold a needle. That's when Nux, on his way back from the bloodshed, caught me. I'd been digging through his tools for snips and needle nose pliers to cold forge the staples when he saw the trail of blood and followed it.
He shouted, threw anything within reach at me. 'Why are you like this?!' he said. I just stood there, ducked whenever he chucked something particularly heavy at my head, but I said nothing. I was too numb inside to speak, face wouldn't move right either, tongue too bogged down with the sharp flavors.
Nux wound up getting the tools for me once he cooled off. My hands wouldn't grip the handles tight enough, I was still too out of it. Nux cut three slivers of steel from a scraped sheet, bent hooked ends into each, then he helped me hold either side of the open split over my cheekbone closed so that the staples could go in and hold it all together. That's why the third was hanging on a cord around my neck, I couldn't let it go.
Thinking about it in that moment, even with the scav there with me, began to suck me down into that rust-pit memory of the shit with Wrecker. Now I had to say something or else slide backwards into myself and hear the sound of the pup Nux had once been, screaming.
"He kept kicking for another eight hundred days, longer than Organic said, so we thought he was full of it... For a while. Then he needed bloodbags all the time. And he stopped talking to me, stopped telling me what was going on with him. We were supposed to cark it historic together."
I felt numb now as I had then, outside of myself listening to my own voice. It sounded flat and matter of fact and it didn't match how the anger over it still burned holes through me. It was those cursed hands of hers in my hair, on my skin, fingers slithering under the layer between us to find a shoulder. Not fair, it was always like being drugged. Sometimes I needed it, other times it was frustrating to be that helpless against it. The head resisting the body only lasted so long.
Her arms were tightening around me and her chin was came to rest on my shoulder. I could look down her back and see the hideous, chrome scaring. It wasn't an eye sore, just different. I looked like that down the left side, too. The more I looked the more I noticed how she flared out toward the backside. Looking at that was a good distraction, until...
"Dune dunno what to say to you, Ducky."
My teeth cooled with a grimace, of course she wouldn't know what to say. Far as I knew everyone she's had die on her went pretty quick so she never had to watch them slowly run out of guzz.
"Shit happens." Yeah, but it isn't supposed to happen the way it did. As if on cue, she asked about how my driver went out.
"Were you there? When his time came?"
Her arms slipped away and their hold was replaced with the pressure of her leaning on me, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for me to say it. There was a stab of guilt and a good lump of that lingering resentment just sitting in my chest like I'd swallowed a rock.
"No, I wasn't."
I felt her head move, so I knew that she was looking at me, probably with that expectant stare. Ugh, she wanted the rest of the story. For someone who hated talking about their shit she sure seemed to enjoy listening to mine. I took a long breath and held it. I can't believe some part of me really wanted to tell her about it, about him. The air left me in a growl, not at her, just the situation from where I picked up this trash emotional cargo.
"He went traitorous, left me behind to go ride with the Immor- Joe. Next thing I know he's with those breeders who got snatched by the one armed filth, spittin' guzz into their engines. I dunno if he's dead or alive. Gotta be dead by now."
Yeah, maybe if Dune and Phil were right about Joe, then Furiosa may have been in the right by grabbing the wives and booking it, but she still completely fucked over her crew. That meant she still wore the filth badge in my head, just one step below Wrecker.
"Oh," She started but her tone seemed off. She must not have expected the story to end like that. I'll admit, it was a shitty ending. "He sounds like an asshole, leavin' you like that."
I sighed, she wasn't wrong but she didn't have the whole story. I'm sure she wouldn't be surprised to hear about what a dick I was because hell, I'm still the same dick socket I've always been, but the level of wretched-shit I put Nux through. I was finally realizing that some of it might have been unnecessary. The real surprise, to me, was that the idea of her judging me for that mess made me want to shut my cola hole and never open it again.
"We were both assholes, Dune."
She said nothing, but settled against me again. Things were getting so weird. Two and a half years ago, if some muffler sucker back home had told me I'd now be sitting next to a half naked woman who at one point had to help me wipe my own ass, first I'd have laughed, then I'd have beaten his fucking head against a wall for spouting off that kind of blasphemy. I'd have dealt out a far harsher thrashing if that same person had suggested that I might even be contented by sitting there just listening to her breathe, tamed like some castrated mutt.
After everything this past week, everything that had been said, I was enjoying the fact that we could just sit here, doing and saying nothing for a while. It couldn't last, not with us. The shine hand rose, taking a hold on my chin to turn my head. She was comparing each scar, I could see the way her gaze shifted left to right. She spoke soft, which only lent the rust in my soul more power.
"So, you really did this side yourself, huh?" A finger stroked the corner of my lip as she asked for an answer she already knew.
The scar wrinkled, I was scowling. Here comes the shame and scorn. She pulled back to look me in the eye and I expected her to say something more, but that didn't happen. The loon came in close again, turning my head in her hands. Her lips warmed the two remaining staples in my face.
Oh, okay.
My head felt like it was on fire, and I didn't dare move. This was very different from her shine hand there. A thought came crashing through my head, it brought a split second of absolute terror. I shouldn't be letting a breeder touch me like this, definitely not one that was supposed to be wifed off to Scabrous Scrotus. But Dune wasn't a breeder. It never happened. She never got shipped to Gas Town and I don't think anything white has ever touched her. Next came craving, I wanted more of that. Maybe this was how those wives clad in their linen whites got Nux to go traitor. This, what the nutter was doing, made everything else just stop mattering.
I began to wonder how much I could get her to touch with her mouth. I wasn't even worried about her teeth as I turned my head. She bared those yellow razors and hissed at me, but it was a grin she wore, not a snarl. That's so normal, and I thought normal had packed its shit and left for good. Being wrong was rarely such a good thing.
The spot where she cut up her lip on her teeth earlier was leaking again, coloring her fangs dark and slipping down her chin in a thin flow. She must have gotten it caught on the metal embedded in me and pulled it open again. What came next happened fast, an impulse move. I've had my mouth on hers before, during the sandstorm when she wasn't breathing, tasted blood then too but that time it was mine. I wanted to taste her, and for a moment it was good. Real good. Then she bit my tongue and back handed me hard across the jaw with that scar hand.
Our eyes locked, red smeared on our faces and breath heavy. A battle was raging in the air between us. I thought this was a coming brawl, I thought I'd be catching her fist in mine next before she could drive her knuckles into my eye. You can't predict everything.
She struck again like an angry snake, quick and ruthless, but not with curled hands. She pulled me back in with a grip on either side of my skull. Teeth clicked painfully, fingernails dragged harsh lines. Was this a fight? Far from wanting to get the distance between us to tussle proper without getting bit, I had her around the waist and yanked her into my lap while she mauled me in this savage yet pleasing way.
There were four hands groping, pulling, squeezing flesh and tugging on hair. My head knocked on the steel wall, then I felt her teeth on my neck. On reflex, I thought she might rip out my throat, so I hooked my thumb into the corner of her lip and pushed her back. There was a pause, and her crazy eyes probed mine. She could easily have sunken her nasty teeth into my fingers, instead she grasped my wrist with her shine hand and curled her tongue around my thumb. The sight of it, seared into my retinas like the flash of road flare in the dark.
She took in the rest of the digit, sucking on it a little. Why does that feel so shine? Felt dangerous too because of those teeth. I still felt and tasted their sting on the end of my tongue. I tried once to bend my thumb and feel the warm, wet textures of her mouth, but she was swift to punish me for that. Dune snapped her jaws around the knuckle and held it hostage with a steady, wild eyed glare. It didn't break skin, but I could feel the threat. Fucking feral.
This wasn't a fight and it wasn't swapping paint, I didn't know what the fuck it was, but I could get used to it. Soon, my fingers were forgotten, her attention shifted to the cut-ups which spanned from wrist to elbow. The feel of cooling lines from her slick lips on my skin made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She was feeling the scars but with her mouth instead of her hand.
My gaze drifted, soaking up every feverish vision and branding it into memory. I could watch her pulse, faintly, just under heaving ribs. It was my turn, I wanted to feel that against my staples.
It wasn't going to happen. The very second I committed to the idea, there was the sound of choked gasping. Dune's head spun to look behind her and I leaned over to see around her shoulder. It was the stolen pup, standing under the door frame, horror stricken. I still couldn't remember his frickin' name.
He dropped whatever had been in his hands and it fluttered to the ground as he stumbled back, stuttered out half a word and fell square on his ass with eyes so wide they might escape their sockets.
"Shit." Dune hissed.
The pup flinched at her voice, scrambling upright and tripping over his own foot as he bolted off toward the bridge. We could hear his sprint for home all the way across the wooden planks until the slam of the screen door on the front of the crow house. After that, a tension hung in the air like a strung up corpse. We were both fast coming to our senses.
I looked at my hands, one held in hers, the other on her right hip, and it seemed surreal. It was no wonder the brat made a run for it, walking in on something like that and greeted by two strangers with bloody mouths. Dune stole a glance at me, then dropped my arm and cut her stare away. She dismounted me with the same expression she might have worn if her rifle had misfired. For the first time ever, Dune felt like being modest. She pulled her once discarded blanket over her shoulders and closed it in her fists in front of her.
"So, that happened." She stated bluntly.
"Uh, yeah." Was all I managed to dignify words her with.
I looked down into my lap, cringing at the evidence of how much my flesh had been enjoying what the kid interrupted. I'm not a pup, I've had my knob polished by anonymous mouths in the deep dark of the tunnels under the War Tower, so I was aware that something had been about to happen before the boy wandered over here. I wound up piling most of my own too thin sheet of rat holed cloth into my lap. The rest of me was cold, but I didn't need Dune cracking a dick joke on top of- shit, on top of everything else. There had been plenty of vulgar jokes before this and there were times she definitely noticed my angry thunderstick futilely seeking vengeance every morning, but I felt like I was due for a flogging. I wondered if Dune might be just as ashamed of the whole deal, if she might not ever touch me again after this thing that just happened. Was the whole day going to be some hell ride through every variation of shit my kind aren't supposed to have to deal with?! Why do I have to feel like this? I hadn't wanted things to change again.
We just sat there, dazed as if we were coming down off of accidentally getting into something that intoxicates and confuses the mind. She grunted next to me, wiping our combined red from her lips and leaving yet another stain in the worn cloth she wore. She rose from the cot, blanket around her like a cloak as she bent down to pick up what the brat had dropped. I could tell by the movement of her eyes that she was reading something on the half crumpled sheet of garbage.
"Start scrubbing your duds. Dune's gonna dig around and try to find something dry for us to throw on. Note says Ard ain't takin' a no from us on the mattah of supper this night."
Fuckin' chrome , I get to deal with the harpy pricking and prodding at us, too.
Dune started pulling at the piles of rubbish. She never told me to wash my crap before, then again, my crap has never been saturated in mud. The few times I'd tried scrubbing my own stuff back at her kip, Dune had snapped at me for doing a piss poor job and ended up redoing it. It used to piss me off until I realized that if I let her do it, it was just one less thing to be bitched at about and one less thing I had to do. The murky water was frigid, hands ached after only a few minutes trying to get the worst of it out of my shirt and vest. Also had to clean up anything that had been in my pockets.
"What a fuckin-forkin' sty," She muttered as things rattled and clanked to the floor while she excavated the junk pile with one hand, the other held her covers closed in front of her chest. She'd never done that before, shield herself from my eyes like this.
"Ah! Eh, that could do," She was tugging at something, putting her full weight into it until she had to shuffle back a step to avoid a small avalanche as part of the mountain of shit collapsed. She seemed to have gotten what she was meaning to, holding it up by a buckled strap with one finger and giving it a sniff. "Too big for Dune, might fit you."
She tossed the thing my way. It rolled down my back after it landed on me. Would be good to get into something dry and that would hide most of my humiliation, but it wasn't looking good for me, blue denim, the worst of all apparel.
"Denim is a sin, Dune!"
"Oof, why?" Her voice was muffled, she was climbing up the pile and holding her blanket closed with her teeth as she dug around some more near the top.
"Because it's BLUE."
"So?" She snapped, pulling up what seemed to be an old grey sweater with the right sleeve half torn off at the shoulder. It was kind of funny to watch her pull it on over her head. The garment had a long neck on it for some reason and her whole head was stuck in it until she pulled it down into a bunch under her chin.
"Have you ever seen anything anywhere besides old world trash that's blue?"
"The sky?"
"Smartass," I snorted. "I mean, anyone with eyes will see it and me in it from a mile away."
"It's not like you're wearin' it into battle, Slit. All that's left to be done on this waning day is eat, shit, and sleep! By tomorrow our stuff'll be dry."
I grumbled and muttered a thing or two under my breath, but began putting both my leg and the blue abomination on. One glance down at myself and I hated the thing. There was no zipper or button. It just had straps and buckles and material over the chest adorned with a pocket.
"I'm not wearing this."
"Ducky, why can't-" She started but couldn't finish once she turned to look at me. Her laughter set fire to my head again, but all too differently this time. She even pointed as she cackled. "You look like a mutant four your old in those overalls! Hah!"
"This is why I didn't wanna wear it!"
"Then c'mere an' dig! Heh, so you don't have to hear Arddie critiquing your evening wear. Wonder what Phil would think." She was teasing me, little demon.
"I think he'd better know how to shut his hole about it."
Something Dune called luggage was pulled out of the mess. Inside it a few things better than the "overalls" were found. I was still stuck with denim, but it wasn't as bad. It was a jacket, faded and coated in red dust. Dune said it looked familiar but couldn't place how or why. The trouser situation was remedied with something that looked like it was made more from patches and pieces of other pants than anything else. I wasn't sure if any of the original parts still existed under the overlapped layers and stitch-work. At least most of it was black. Dune had to settle for a similar pair, but there were only patches over the seat and knees of the ones she found for herself.
Reasonably clean but wet clothes were hung on whatever could hold them up, doors, hooks on the wall, this dead bush thing outside. Now there was nothing else to do but go over there to join the others. By this time Phil had surely told everyone else about me showing up soaked in filth. Getting real sick of smeg-heads laughing at me today. What about the kid who walked in at the worst, most mediocre moment possible? What did he tell the others? Who knows. He certainly paled a shade or two when we arrived, side stepping his way around Ardith to stand behind her and duck his head. What the fuck happened to this pup? What kind of sick shit did his original caretakers back home do to him?
Ard narrowed her eyes at the cowering boy, then turned to have a look at us. Her expression twisted momentarily, you wouldn't pick up on it unless you were looking for it, but I could tell that she had some idea of what the pup had seen. She gave him a pat on the arm and pointed him to the gramophone her and Dune had been so chuffed about on the first night here. Now she came our way.
The maniac at my side looked a little like she was shrinking, avoiding eye contact and trying to appear less threatening. It was an uncommon mannerism for her, she must have felt like flat tire over the squabble they had earlier. Ardith only had to smile at her and they were soon flipping through records, looking for something called Eagles so that they could hear about somewhere called Hotel California. Guess they were okay with each other then.
I had nothing to do but stand there lookin' ugly, so I ambled toward the fire to watch that. Phil and Bones were keeping an eye on a several plucked birds and what might be some other four legged thing rotating over the flames on spits.
"Damn, you clean up good."
I know when a compliment isn't really a compliment, so I mocked Phil's words back at him. He just smirked and kept turning that sizzling meat while I overheard the conversation Dune and the nag were having.
"You know, Sister, you two look real spooky like this."
"Eh? Like what?"
"You an' Slit. Don't you know you're both wearing your mom and pa's old clothes? Green on grass, if he were blond I'd almost mistake him for your old man from the back. That was his jacket, don't you remember?"
I turned my head to see Dune's reaction. Her brows rose and her mouth popped open as she gawked.
"Oh. Damn, you're right. What was his stuff doing in a suitcase?"
The redhead shrugged. "I packed up a bunch of old things and stowed it away in case someone needed it. Guess nobody around here wanted to wear your pop's stuff, or try filling his boots like that. A lot of the old timers remember him bein' a bushranger type."
"Ah," She caught my stare, cringed and turned back to Ard. "Hey, sis?"
There was a funny gestural exchange. Ardith's right eyebrow quirked and her jaw flexed, Dune just jerked her head toward the door. They got up then, and I almost followed out of reflex because lately I didn't like it when I couldn't see where the nutter was.
"That's a bad sign." Bones, it was his words which stopped me from trying to follow the scav.
"Huh? The hell does that mean?"
His speckled face stretched into a sneering grin. "Two women walkin' off like that, means something's wrong and that you are prolly' the problem."
"I didn't do jack shit!" It was knee-jerk, coming to my own defense, but as soon as it left my throat, I cringed.
"Ah! See? There it is right there. You know what you did. I don't, but you do." He practically cawed like one of the black birds.
Featherknife had something to add, just a mocking 'Ohh, yir dead, mate.' while my guts churned acid. Bones was asking for a broken jaw, smirking at me with that smarmy face. Phil mediated, lifting an arm between us and pulling down his respirator to speak. He seemed to wear it whenever he had to lean over the fire pit.
"They had a hollering match at each other earlier. Could be about that." Phil uttered though a wheeze. Not very warboy-like of him to serve an opinion like that instead of heaping the derision upon me. Living here had done a number on him, or maybe it was his charmed married life that made him so rust.
I sat and watched the fire dance, the others held conversations about this and that which didn't concern or interest me in the slightest so it was all just noise to me. I was busy replaying in my skull the things that the loon said out in the bog, also what had happened in Dune's former home today.
I'm an idiot.
"Whus'at?" There was a cold -and slightly sticky- little finger poking into my arm. Sump, with his sister standing next to him and chewing on the end of her own sleeve. He was waggling his finger on my cut-ups, asking what particular things etched into the designs were.
"It's a thunderstick."
"What's a thunderstick?" The girl one chirped. She was a little easier to understand because she still had all of her pup teeth, her brother was missing the top front and sounded a little lispy.
Phil rumbled in his throat and shot me a hard glare. "Ardith doesn't like me tellin' the pups war stories... but she ain't here, is she?"
That was permission.
I didn't bother much with pups back home, aside from the ones old enough to start learning how to throw thunder. Nux was mostly the one making use of their minuscule hands and nimble little fingers for the more tedious work in the garages. It was expected of him anyway, being so close to the end, that he should try to pass on what he knew before he went and burnt out. The way he talked about it, entertaining pups was easy. They like stories and repetition, he'd said. He failed to mention that they tried to find meaning or reason in every little thing. I tried a story about buzzards to give the use of a thunderstick an explanation, but that only supplied them with more questions.
"Why're they so spiky?"
"To stop lancers from hopping on their rigs and kickin' their heads in?"
And that was only the beginning. Why do they like rust so much? Where do they live? Why did you have to kill 'em? Who's their leader? Have you ever seen one without its goggles on? Most of those questions had to be answered with the best guess. It would be better to just finish the story.
I got a little too close once. I had run out of thundersticks and resorted to cutting at the rust fuckers with a glaive. I had leaned out too far to jab at the driver with the blade and got caught on the rusted sabers. I could still recall how it hadn't even hurt. The pups certainly seemed to enjoy the tale of faithful service to... Joe. Still wasn't sure how I felt about matter of an immortal who turned out to be mortal. I avoided his name when I gave the reason we were out there, under his orders which had been passed down from him to the Prime, then to the other imperators until it came to we half-life warriors. A few bands of pursuit teams bolstered the patrol crews and the daily survey of the land became a wild hunt. They had been getting cocky and roaming our territory in broad daylight, so they had to be pushed back into their badlands on the regular until they got the hint.
The buzzard driver's neck had split open at the first graze of the serrated blade at the end of my pole arm, but I didn't lean back fast enough as the corpse lead footed the breaks and slumped over the wheel. Nux hadn't seen it coming either and maintained speed as the departed enemy swerved toward us. The buzzard buggy's breaks squealed and we fanged it right passed. The prongs raked my ribs and gut, I was torn off the lancers perch and flung between the chariots. My clawing hands managed to catch the frame of the passenger window, knees and boots dragging for but a moment, still long enough to make it look like someone took a sanding belt to my shins. Adrenaline was how I managed to haul myself back up and into the lancers basket. I remember the blood streaking across the rear glass and how it smeared all around the roof hatch under my hands. Oh, the way Nux looked as he slid open the top to look back at me, like he'd been the one who just got gutted.
Keep after 'em! I'd howled. We took down another within three minutes. The air whipping over the roof of the Coupe had me painted in red all up and down the right side. Looked chrome, I'm sure, but my liver was damn near hanging out and gushing body fuel. I was too kamicrazy to feel it until I woke up in the blood shed hours later, while the Organic Mechanic was poking around inside me to put my shit back together. That was the time I almost bled out on a chase, then again on the slab where you go to get hacked up some more. I had pushed that line between chrome and stupid a little too far. According to Nux, I sort of just fell off the back after that second kill and rag dolled. Must have lost a bit too much and blacked out. The Organic said my guts looked like they went though a blender, couldn't sit up on my own for more than a week, and the road rash was murder. I tried to repress the memory of Nux, how he was there for most of the excruciating repairs I needed, the way he'd come to change dressings when he was sure that the Organic was either too high or too lazy to do it often enough to satisfy my driver. I didn't tell them about those parts.
These brats just ate up the grit of the story like lizards on a maggoted corpse. I pushed open the jacket to show them the scars and the staples. The smallest of the three tried twice to pluck at the metal and had to be stopped, but not by me nor the others. Ardith had reappeared and was the one to stoop down and scoop him up, glowering at me with the action. I could only offer a shit-eating grin, which strengthened her already visible contempt for me. Dune was just behind her, and I could feel the joy in irritating Ard flee like roaches when you light torches at the Citadel. The scav had on a tight lipped smile, the kind people wear when they want to say something but keep it to themselves for your benefit.
Plates were handed out, others whose names I never bothered to learn showed up with their spawn too. I stood in the line next to Dune, she still hadn't said a thing. Fuck, rusted mediocre fuck. The time came to sit and eat. Everyone was talking, Ardith was next to Featherknife and helping him get food into the pups while Dune and I sat a car length apart and didn't even look at each other. I ate because my meat suit felt hungry, tired limbs and shaky fingers, but my guts weren't too thrilled. I was still letting my head torture me, so the grub more or less had to be forced down. When Dune was finished with her plate, she rose to take it to the bucket of soiled dishes. She stopped to take mine. Our fingertips touched and I felt a pang of longing for the shine hand. I just wanted things to be normal.
When she first hauled me to her homestead, I'd wanted things to go back the the way they had been at the Citadel. Now, I think I'd settle for getting things back to the way they were before the sandstorm. The only thing I'd miss would be the sleeping arrangement. Shit. How was that going to work if she didn't even want to sit next to me? A body leaning into my arm shattered that thought.
"Dune don't want to talk about it, not right now. She just wants things to be normal for a while."
We wanted the same thing, and I could give her that, so I did the most usual thing I could think of and lay my head and arms over her lap for the nightly business. She appeared comforted, soon leaning back and using the foam of what had once been a chair cushion as a pillow, all the while her left hand scratched through the hair on my face to find the ruined and shine parts. I think we were both so relieved by this that we each fell asleep on the floor of that crow shack, there could be no other explanation for waking in the middle of the night, still next to the fire pit. The fire was out, I could barely spy the glow of dying embers settled deep in the nest of ash.
At some point while we were piling up Z's, she'd rolled onto her side and my head thudded to the stone. That's what woke me. Oh, we'd be walking funny tomorrow from sleeping on the cobbled stone. I rubbed at the spot on my skull that tapped the floor and looked around. There was very little light, only the flickering of one tiny flame in a tallow candle. I could see Phil, Ardith, Bones, Featherknife, the four of them packed together on a fold out couch which sat by the far wall. The pups must have slept in a room off the main one.
I didn't really want to move, the stones by the fire pit were still warm and so was Dune, but I had to take a whizz. It was easiest to go outside and around to the left of the garage to do that, it was cold but I didn't feel like groping around in a strange dwelling looking for a pot to piss in. I checked Dune first, slack jawed and snoring. Not much chance that she'll get up to walk, so I pulled on my leg, which I must have slipped off sometime hours ago when I was half asleep.
Stumbling blind around some shoddy shack looking for a place to drop a stream isn't something that would normally be memorable, but unwillingly greeting the dirt with my face is. I hadn't even had a chance to zip up and I hadn't known who it was. My elbow flew back twice, trying get the weight off me so I could turn and slice this rust sucker from sack to Adam's apple. The sound of strained breaths whistling through black lungs and dry coughing told me who it was, fucking Phil. Must have outstayed our welcome, finally.
I flipped the blade on my arm forward, but not before a fist loosened a few of my teeth. He tried pinning my slashing arm then, so I brought the steel of my metal knee into his ribs and he went rolling off me. It became a dirt struggle, he had my blade arm, I had his pistol hand. The revolver was dropped somewhere in the darkness, and I was knocked flat again when his skull met mine. By the time I had my wits back, I found that he was crouched over me. I couldn't see it, but he had my right hand under his left boot and my left arm pinned over my head. I could feel the teasing of a shiv under my chin and the smell of his breath as he kept on sputtering and retching over me.
"I don't want this, Slit. You know I don't want it."
"What the fuck are you doing! Get the fuck off me!"
"Who did it! Who killed him! And why?"
"Who?!"
"Joe, Assjack! Which imperator killed Joe?" It was a whisper, harsh and urgent but still inappropriately quiet. I didn't care to be quiet. I still had my freaking fly open and a knife poking me in the jugular, didn't have much choice but to say it though, tell him who.
"Furiosa." I spat it out for him, loudly enough that something stirred inside the house.
He growled, and that blade threatened to pop through the skin and tickle that neck bleeder. "You wake up my kids, I will gut you."
"What a loving father." I sneered, and he only ground the treads of his boot into my hand. I didn't give him the satisfaction of voicing the pain of that. Downright evil of him threatening to ruin my throwing hand.
"Why." He hissed.
"Get off me first, geezer."
He was a fool to put away the shiv and trust me. I'll give him what he wants, but not before...
"Urgh! God!" The moment we stood, I had grabbed him by his dumb striped scarf, bent him over and drove my flesh knee into his gut.
"I don't know why. She snaked his prized breeders and went east in the War Rig." I told him while he rolled on the wet ground and likely held his aching guts. "She somehow shredded him on the Gigahorse on the way back to the Citadel."
It was too dark to see but it sounded like the deserter was about to toss up, I could hear him hauling himself back up to rasp out another question, one I expected. "Oh, fuckin- Well?! Did she take over or did one of the others?"
"When I went to check it out, the wretcheds said the traitor filth was the top dog, givin' 'em water and food and shit. She and them breeders are running things."
It took another minute, but once he was done hacking and gagging he had one more thing to say. "There's going to be a meeting tomorrow, you're coming and you're going to tell the others exactly what you just told me."
"I don't take orders from deserters, why the fuck should I?"
"Because if you do it I'll put a friggin' windshield on your rusty hunk of shit car! How's that? stubborn jackass,"
I didn't need to leave him hanging for a few breaths, I just wanted him to think I might refuse. Fangin' rust monger. "Fine, I'll take it."
"Good, now, get the hell away from me before I knock your teeth so far down your throat you'll smile on the wrong end."
I was happy to buzz off. Once inside I collected the maniac and steered her to the car as she stumbled and muttered unintelligible gibberish. My intent was to sleep in the back like we had for the last few days, but once again, rest didn't come for me. I sat awake listening to Dune's dream rambling until the sun rose and lit up the fog. I was just waiting for yet another obligation I didn't have any choice in upholding.
