Chapter Text
He remembers when the Salt was just the sea, blue and cold and beautiful and full of fish. He remembers a small hotel by the beach (room service, smooth walls painted soft green, running water, a shower, the indoor pool downstairs, wobbly suitcase wheels rolling over gleaming linoleum, it was so normal and now it's all gone, and the stuff of legend, at that), and spending a summer there with Jessie after their marriage, and then again right before the Sprog was born, and he remembers the ever-rumble of waves (kaa-hush, kaa-hush, kaa-hush, how glorious), and the way the saltwater would dry on his skin, and the way the sun would turn Jessie's skin dark and hair pale, and the way sand seemed wonderful (soft and warm and soothing, easy to wash away later, soft enough to fall asleep in) instead of terrible. He remembers.
No one else alive knows the sound of waves. No one else has ever been in a hotel, or had painted walls, or a real shower, or seen a pool. They've never seen a garden, either, not one that wasn't full of scraggly, tasteless vegetables. They've never seen flowers.
Jessie kept flowers. She was so good at it, too. The boxes by the window were so full of blooms.
(I should have left, he thinks. While there were still waves on the sea, I should have left this place for somewhere that could still hold the green.)
The closest thing to that sound is usually thunder, when a heat storm kicks up the sands, but there is also the roar of many engines. Up close, of course, it's a terrible sound, but from a distance, it can sound just a bit like the sea.
Max can pick that sound up faster than Dog ever did. (He misses Dog. He misses all dogs. Maybe there are still dogs in the world. Maybe he can find one and keep it alive and maybe make it happy because nothing is better than a happy dog. Hell, at this point, he'll take a vaguely friendly cat.) He can also hear, not so unlike the cries of seagulls, the whooping and screeching of the mad scavs tracking him.
Well, shit, he thinks.
And he so drives.
Without technology to make even the smallest people feel powerful and self-sufficient, the realization that men are not much by their own right tends to make one afraid, especially while surrounded by the rubble of some dehydrated apocalypse.
Max remembers that feeling setting in sort of late. Because the world wasn't all dust and rubble, in the beginning. People still lived in their houses, and had their families, and there were still stores and hospitals and cops, like him. The sea wasn't the Salt quite yet. The Wasting Sicknesses hadn't set in. There were just a whole bunch of idiots taking advantage of bad times, tearing up the roads and vandalizing every place they came to. Stealing and pillaging, like some barbarians out of history books, except these were wearing leather gear instead of goat furs and riding motorcycles instead of war horses. And every single one of them thought they were the shit.
It had seemed like the worst thing that could happen, at the time, but he thought it was temporary. He was a cop. He had seen things go south before, especially with the water wars and all that. So it was bad, sure, and things would never be the same again, but it would get better. World War II was also very, very bad, and many, many people died horribly but, despite the name, that wasn't the end of the world. And neither was this. The world could not possibly be so unfixably broken. That only happened in movies.
Then Jessie and his boy died (were murdered, thoughtlessly, for nothing) and nothing got fixed.
But the world didn't revolve around him, and he knew that losing his wife and son didn't mean the world was ending. Everyone lost people and the Earth kept spinning.
No, he didn't realize that the world was ending until later, when he saw every farm abandoned, all the crops warped and withered, and the ground soured by contaminated water. When he could drive for a week and more without seeing a single living person- that's when it set in.
That's when the end of the world caught up to him.
The car rolls. It'll be fine, he can tell. It's sort of like him, that way. He can't remember ever having to replace an important part, and it always comes back to him no matter how many other people drive it away.
He's dead. He's definitely dead. He hears the deafening grind of his vertebrae all getting too friendly with each other as his back compresses and bends. And then there's cool, blessed darkness for a second, maybe two; maybe even a lucky three.
But he's back up with a snap of bones righting themselves, coughing dust and blood and exhaust, and he tells these idiots with their stupid paint and their stupid shaved heads,
"Piss off!"
They cackle at him. They're insane. So is he, but these guys are absolutely coo-coo for Coco Puffs, and even he can't say that about himself. Not yet.
They stink like they're sick. They probably all are. He's heard people speak of half-life, and he thought it was just because normal humans can't live as long anymore when the world's just so unrelenting on the mortal body, but maybe he was wrong. Is this what they were talking about? Their bones smell wrong. Rotten. Is this a Wasting Sickness? (He really misses the internet. So many questions.)
He breathes in the dust. It's dry and dead. No life, none at all. Even the bacteria is thinned out. But there might be a cockroach around somewhere.
His lungs collapse and it's all dark again for awhile.
Yeah, his skin doesn't like getting inked. The tattoo will be gone in a day. Suck it.
Blood and water spill from his heart and lungs out of his mouth. They sit and watch him for awhile, thinking he'll die and then they'll eat him, but he doesn't because he won't, so they shrug it off and go about their business again.
He smells good greens and clear water somewhere up above the smoke and oil, and it cuts a spearing line through the reek of death. All these boys are covered in some sort of toxic paint, he can smell it, and it's filling them with lumps and ruining their guts so they get too sick to process their food. They need to be clean.
"Go to the ocean," he says, rasping to the light and flinching from a ghost at the corner of his eye, "go to the sea and wash it away. Cut the lumps out. Let the salt pull the infection. Fish'll eat the dead cells away. Be clean."
It hurts his mouth to say as much. He might have bitten his own tongue in half during the crash. It's fine now but a regrown part always feels new and full of sting for awhile.
"Kamikrazy. Might be a Full Life, but he's fanged up in the head."
The ink won't stay and he barely feels the needle but when he hears the sizzle of hot iron, well, he knows that would heal too, but he's in no mood to be cattle.
He runs.
He know he probably won't make it out, not yet, but he needs to see this place he's in, if he wants to get out later. And, and, the most important part, is that he needs to find the green, because if there's green then there must be good water and good earth, they must have hidden some away here, somehow.
He finds it through the fire and the filth, passes his car on the way (it always comes back to him, so he doesn't worry), and almost doesn't realize he's found it until a mist of fresh, cool water covers his face. He breathes it in and his bones find some of their steel again. The green curls towards him, reaching, reaching, for what he can offer it.
A pale vine curls around his outstretched fingers.
And then he's running.
The ghosts make it difficult.
They're not really ghosts, of course. Ghosts aren't real. Some of his Kin called them Spirits, or just Others. They take the faces and voices of the dead. Being able to See them is a curse, without a doubt, because the most of them are mean, sadistic beasts, out to drive a Seeing man mad. But they've been known to be helpful. Max even knows a few.
He doesn't know any of these Others. They seem less like Others and more like true echoes of the dead, crying out as they are, but he knows better. Because these Others call to him by name. They know what he is.
It's odd that they care.
Almost as odd as the urge to fling himself out of a hole and into the sky.
Can he fly? Has any of his kind flown before, grown wings and ascended? Would they be wings of wax?
Probably not, is the answer to all of those things, but Max is swinging back and forth on an iron hook now, wondering if he should take the easy way out and drop himself to the stone. It would be too quick to hurt and he would go splat and some of those hungry humans down there would probably steal his clothes and some of his bones too, but it would be so easy, wouldn't it? Falling is a good way to die, once the fear is gone, and it is, it is. The fear is gone. Falling is almost pleasant.
He doesn't fall.
If only.
He's met false gods before. The apocalypse bred them in droves. Power-hungry havoc-heads, trying to balance order and chaos as if they meant anything to the world. Did they not realize that they, too, would become dust? They were mortal. He could smell it.
(This is not meant to imply that he is a god, because he isn't, but he's definitely something of the supernatural breed. They all are.)
The Humungus was one of those idiots, tough like steel and mean for blood, who probably had some heritage in him that made him a little more or a touch less than the average human, but death was in him, actively wearing him down. He was nothing, in the end. He's dead now, for certain. Max imagines that someone probably ate him and sucked the last trickle of power from his bones. Maybe that gave them a few extra years, or kept them from getting sick. Maybe that just drove them mad because you're really not supposed to eat people. Although, when food's so scarce, it's worth parasites and bloodborne pathogens, right?
And Auntie Entity, well, he knew she was like him. She knew too many things about the pre-apocalypse, spoke of it like her own, and she was just a touch too smart in manipulation. Not smart enough, of course, but the power she had over the crowds, the fact that she managed to get that power in the first place, was indicative of a fair bit more than she admitted. Maybe she was not quite his kind, but she was at least part way there. A grandparent, back a few generations, had probably bred it into the family line. Entity, that odd creature, might still be alive and well and mostly youthful still.
"Wacko," Max mutters. He's not sure if he'd care to see her again. She'd probably try to kill him, just to see if she could get what he has, and then he'd have to kill her, and the last of her line would bleed into the sand. What a waste would that be.
Or maybe he could use that blood to bring a patch of earth back to life. He knows that works, sometimes. If he buried her and let her bones feed the ground, some green might come back, or maybe an animal.
Blood matters.
That, Max supposes, is what's happening with Immortan Joe, or whatever-the-hell this fella's name is. Max is having a hard time focusing because he's upside-down and pouring blood through a tube into a plastic bag, but he's picking up enough to know a few things.
Also, his nose still works. All these War Boys are poisoned. Poisoned to death. On purpose, probably, because it's in the paint, which is being given to them.
Population control. The chalky, self-applied kind.
Max aches a little where his heart burst earlier, but he hopes his blood does some good for whoever gets it. It might cure a wasting, or make someone immune to the toxic paint, or strengthen their gut enough that they can eat right. Although, down here, it sounds like they'll all just die anyway. Kamikrazy is right.
When the alarm blares, he doesn't much care. It might be his opportunity to escape, might not be. He can't get lost in this hustle and bustle, but it looks like all the healthy ones are leaving, which will make escaping easier.
Ah, except- oh. So that's what they're going to use him for. He'd think it clever if only it wasn't so stupid.
Perfect.
He tries not to worry about Interceptor. She'll come back to him. She always does.
In the meantime, he's chained to this stupid person, secured to a stupid car, and rock music is blaring along with them as these painted idiots howl across the sands. Chains rattle. The sick boy's heart is pulling Max's blood through a plastic tube. What did the boy call it? High octane? Hm. That is not a completely inaccurate description, in all honesty. What it will do to the boy, though, is the question.
Max can hear thunder.
He settles in for a nap.
At some point, he feels death a little too close on their heels, and so he wakes up and stops the stupid boy from killing them both. (Could he even do that?) And then, heh.
And then the crash.
He is so pleased with how things work out, sometimes.
He's still a little bit dead when he wakes up again. One eye is sort of blind and loose in the socket, and it's a good thing he kept that leg brace on because the bone is shattered just below the knee, and his lungs are full and bloody.
He calmly coughs it up and waits for the bone to fuse so that his leg will stop twitching.
"You're really something," he says to the painted boy, who should be dead, but isn't. He's a bit colder than he should be, blue around the lips and fingertips, but he's breathing, and not a single bone's broken. Impressive.
(But he really should be dead, shouldn't he?)
He dislocates his own jaw to remove the muzzle, the needle, and the undignified chain. He takes his jacket back.
Then he shuffles the boy over his shoulders and starts walking. His jaw pops back into place.
"You were right. Lovely day."