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“Oh, and we saw your boy.”
Furiosa can’t see anything; Capable just changed the bandage over her eye and the pain in her head is as bad as it’s been all this week, so she’s keeping the other closed for now as well. She’s learned that the luxury of sight isn’t worth what follows. Still, she opens her good eye at that, and squints through the sickening, diving light rays at the mud-covered shape in the doorway.
“What?” she manages, hating the rasp that clings to her voicebox.
“Your boy, your road warrior. The crazy bleeder who jumped off the lift and fucked off to parts unknown.” The old woman points at her head, steps closer so Furiosa, squinting harder through the pain, can make out the ugly bruise on her temple, and the ragged, curved wound on her wrist. “Well, they’re known now. Or were, about four hours ago. Those are bite marks,” she explains, in case Furiosa hadn’t caught on.
“Where,” she croaks. Jedda snorts.
“Fuck knows. He was hiding under some road trash, about eighty clicks out. Thought he was a goner at first, tried to pull him out—bad idea,” she concludes, drily. “Surprised he had any fight left in him, to be honest, head bleeding like that. Nothing wrong with those teeth, though.”
Furiosa tries to speak, finds her throat cracked and swollen. She swallows hard, remembers to close her eyes, and asks again from inside sudden, uneasy darkness: “So where is he?”
“Gone,” Jedda’s voice tells her, with a new note of gentleness. “Took off after the biting. Heading south, I think, fast as that leg could take him. He didn’t want to be found,” she says, and touches Furiosa’s shoulder for a moment, all the warmth of the desert in her hand.
What the pain is, exactly, that bubbles up from her chest then, Furiosa isn’t sure. There’s a scream building for no reason behind her tongue, a scream that’s part idiot and part stop and part get me out. She takes in a sharp breath, knowing how it’ll hurt, and leans back into the pillow, floating on vertigo and nausea and stupid helpless rage she can’t possibly show in here, in this place that’s supposed to be green and quiet and good. She can smell the sun and mud and exhaust on Jedda’s coat, and right now, soggy bandages and all, she’d give anything to smell like that again.
“Tell me,” she whispers. “If you see him again.”
/ / /
His leg breaks.
Actually, that is not precisely what happens, in the frightful, sticky patch of waste he stumbles into some days after fighting off a raiding party near the irreparable ruins of his car. What happens, he can’t see, because it’s night and no moon when he first wakes from nightmares to notice that his left leg won’t bend when he tries to curl into a tighter ball (an armadillo person, he thinks: that’s him—man in a shell suit). He works out, feeling desperately in the pitch black and running the choked gears in his head as hard as they’ll go, that something in the ooze covering the ground here got into the hinge of the brace, spilling soft, sticky rust throughout the mechanism, freezing his leg in place. He grunts and pulls at the joint, but nothing happens, and his stiff swollen fingers can’t find the tiny pieces that buckle the straps to his leg, and here he is, leg broken.
He stares into darkness for a while, not thinking much, then lies back, turns on his side, and lets strange hands carry him to sleep.
The heart attack wakes him, like it always does, some time around noon of the next day. The sun almost blinds him on the way up from the ground, and then mud smothers him as he pitches back down, jerked half around on a leg that won’t shift. He flips onto his back, flails left and right to scan the landscape, and spits sour mud down his front, sun flashing behind his crusted eyes, leg muscles spasming frantically against leather, heart dancing somewhere in the region of his sore throat. It takes a while and a lot of squinting to establish that none of the screaming is actually happening, and once that’s clear he gives his stupid ear a good whack and sets to dragging himself upright.
The earth’s slippery and he’s shaking like a granddad, but he eventually manages to prop himself up on the stiff leg and draw the rest of him up, a slow cautious balancing act that leaves him caught in the dead center of a mud field and breathing hard. He bends to have another ago at undoing the buckles, and slips: another faceful of rotten earth. Somebody’s laughing, but he can’t see or tell how close; he can’t get the mud out of his eyes or the sluggish pain out of his fingers or the fucking brace off his fucking animal piece of shit fucking leg. His heart’s a tight balloon about to pop. He scrabbles at the straps, breaks a nail on an iron buckle, kicks foul sprays of mud into the air trying to dislodge the corrosion, strips the skin from both palms hauling at the slimy leather, hears somebody whisper in his ear that she’s right behind him, turn around and look, Max—and he spins on his sore bum to find empty fucking air.
In all this time, he’s managed to shift the stuck jaws of the brace a couple inches, maybe. So now his leg’s permanently bent at the slightest angle, not quite straight and not anything like mobile. No car, no leg. His heart, already cranked to a slightly sickening pace, kicks into a higher gear, and he bends towards the earth to spit bile into a patch of silky soft weeds.
I’m here, Max, she sings into his ear, breathless and close, fingers prying at his brain, tap-tap-tapping along the burnt ridge of his skull, tiny shocks of pain rippling across his scalp and down his spine. I’m here, I’m here, come find me Max, Max, don’t leave me, come here, I’m here, where are you.
And there’s the other voice, louder: TURN AROUND!
He spins again, and sees it. A low, loping, black creature, belly scraping the mud, bones squirming under sodden skin, cold fur bristling. He sits rooted in the mud, watching, burning and freezing as his vision shimmers in and out and the shape swells and bleeds, her voice screaming in his ear to look out, look OUT, Max, and he holds his breath as harsh paws dig into his leg and a weary set of teeth start to worry hungrily at his ear.
“Hey,” he breathes, hearing his own voice for the first time in weeks, a jarring echo inside his own head. He pats at the dog’s side frantically, shaking his head to pull the ear away. “Ow.” Dog snaps at his lost dinner, growls at Max, angry and startled and mainly just hungry, and Max offers his sleeve to gnaw at. An apology of a kind. He rubs the dog’s bony head while it chews happily, teeth scraping Max’s arm, making him shiver.
The shiver climbs his spine, curls his shoulders, wrenches his leg against the broken brace, and the gentle, angry voice whines at him: Max. He lets his forehead fall against the dog’s neck, breathing in the smell of fleas rotted by mud that’s just pure fucking poison.
Where are you, Max? He doesn’t know.
Come find me. Don’t leave me.
He tilts his head to press his bad ear, the one that whistles and buzzes and tricks him, into the dog’s fur. Dog doesn’t complain. He’s got a sleeve to chew. Max reaches up blindly to pat his head again, and gets a friendly growl in answer, hot and clear and right up close.
No leg. No car. Just a dog as ugly and hungry as any he’s ever seen.
Max holds on.
/ / /
The car they’ve found for her is the smallest thing she’s ever driven that had doors, and sitting in it means choking on tar smoke and somebody’s sweat. It’s anything but fancy, but it’s what they have to spare for what she knows is no essential mission. It’ll get the job done. It’ll carry her out to the south, and that’s all she cares about.
She sets out for the first time on a lightless morning, straps her arm to her chest and gathers some things from Capable’s expanding, constantly reorganized shelves, and by the time the sun breaks over the horizon to split the shadows she’s approaching the pass where everything ended not so very long ago. Looking at the shattered wreckage as she drives through, it feels like it’s been a year. A whole lifetime, maybe.
She drives till nightfall that first day, reaching what she thinks is the point Jedda told her about and veering south. The only life she sees all day is a ragged patch of black wings wheeling somewhere to the west, and by the time shadows fall again the pain in her chest and side has shifted from nagging to dizzying. She turns the car, leaving the birds and the empty waste behind her, and follows the path she took back to the Citadel.
Then she’s grounded for three more days, stuck in the tower waiting for the pain to lessen and for Capable, whose patience is wearing thin, to pronounce her ready again. She didn’t realize how many hours could be in a day until she spent every one of them trapped, pacing and watching the horizon and trying to help the Dag with her garden, Capable with her brimming shelves, Toast with the account books. She’s all but useless, and she wonders how they did it all those years. She wonders more how they do it now.
For her, it’s only a few days. Capable finally nods and tells her to go careful, and the next morning she’s back out to the waste, packed this time for a journey of days, more careful this time to stop every hour or so and rest even though the pain of slowing herself down is almost equal to the physical pain that ramps up whenever she doesn’t.
Pain or not, she’s not turning back this time. He’s somewhere in this dead country with a bleeding head and, if she’s put the signs together, no car. Like that, he won’t last long, and Furiosa, whose heart is pumping blood that isn’t hers, owes him more than that.
She drives till dark, and sees the same things. Sand. Mountains. Birds, screaming in the distance. The second day, dipping further south, her wheels hit mud. She crawls through the ooze for hours, learns not to gag at the faint miasma, and sees nothing. The land’s more clearly poisonous here than anywhere else she’s seen; when she rests at noon with her feet swung out of the car’s cramped door, she half expects the wet ground to dissolve the soles of her boots. She prays that if Max is here, he’s had the good sense to stay clear of the mud.
For six days, she criss-crosses the mud, moving steadily south, fanning out as methodically as she can, going slow and patient. This isn’t a job to rush. She sees creatures here, some familiar enough as birds or toads or sickly, furless rats, others not quite right in ways she can’t place. Nothing—nobody—human.
On the evening of the sixth day, she nearly drives over him. He’s lying in the mud, tangled up with what appears to be a mostly starved dog. Possibly a dead dog. From anything farther than a few feet, he looks like a clump of rotten reeds, but closer to she recognizes a shoulder and a hand, and slams the brakes so that the car skids serenely sideways in its slimy tracks before stopping a few feet from his body.
The first thing she discovers is that he’s breathing, a discovery that unlocks a thick knot of fear she’d firmly ignored till now and sends relief shooting through her. His chest lifts and falls slightly under her hand, punctuated by weird tiny jerks as though the air’s catching on the way in and out.
The second thing is that he’s burning from the inside. She gets her hand underneath his head to lift it out of the mud and scrape some of the filth off, and finds his skin hot as if he’d been cooking in the sun for hours instead of sleeping in muggy rotten earth. She wipes the mud off his cheek and forehead, careful of the split blisters and yellow sores underneath the gritty slime, and bends to touch her head to his, hissing a little at the burn of his skin. Sagging heavy against her grip, Max makes a tiny, choking noise without opening his eyes.
“Max,” she says, testing out his own name on his ears for the first time. He shakes his head minutely, pulling back with the strength of a drowned cat. “Max,” she repeats, louder this time, calling through mud and fever to get his attention. “I’m here. Max? I’ve got you.”
Max doesn’t wake, but the dog does. For a minute, Furiosa has her hands full wrestling twenty skeletal pounds of angry fur that appear to have attached themselves resolutely to her friend. She gets the dog off her eventually, grateful for an arm that won’t take damage easily, and turns back to Max.
He’s pushed himself up on his elbows, which seems to be about as far as he can go, and he’s blinking at her through muddy, bloodshot eyes. It’s not at all clear he knows who he’s looking at. She holds up her hands, hoping he’ll recognize the arm if nothing else, and tries again to get through.
“Max.”
His eyes widen, but he doesn’t move.
“You got lost,” she tells him, putting out a hand to steady him as his arms start to shake. He flinches back, slips, and she ends up catching him after all, guiding his head awkwardly onto her knee. She notices the hard, matted patch of hair at the back of his skull this time, and the fact that his left ear is nearly missing.
He only sat up a minute, but his breath is coming in quick painful gasps. He’s hot as an engine, twitching angrily even as she tries to pat his arm in a way she hopes is somehow calming, and she suspects if he had any strength left in him at all he’d be trying to knock her teeth out.
He cranes his neck back to search for her eyes, and when he finds them, she knows she’s got him.
“Come on,” she says, leaning close to be sure he can hear. “It’s time to go home.”
/ / /
Max doesn’t know who’s taken him. He knows he fought, can feel the bastard’s kick to his chest, his claws along the side of his skull, his poison clogging up his veins, but he can’t see a face, can’t remember who put him here, drugged sick and paralyzed in the back of some reeking truck ready to stick and stab and drain and hang from his heels. Everything’s speeding up, heat and blood and bile rushing to his head together as the spinning light just outside his eyes goes crazy, dancing and sparking and hissing like a firecracker about to blow.
He groans, rolls onto his stomach to face the floor and retch, and feels the shuddering of engines slow to a rough, thumping halt.
“Hey.” He hears her over his own noises, cool and light, tired. Doors creak and slam; there’s a hand cupping his face, and he spits and squints and remembers. She helps him sit up, brings a bottle of water to his lips, and he remembers more, gripping one stinging hand in the fabric at her shoulder to keep from toppling. He moves his lips in silence and swallows as well as he can, and her arm doesn’t leave his shoulders.
She helps him lie down again, and already the fog is billowing back through his skull, but she tells him to sleep. Sleep, Max, and he does, before he’s meant to.
Later, there are sharp pains in his joints, a smelly dog sitting on his legs, and her fingers tugging diligently at the buckles around his leg. There’s more water, and a voice from the open waste that he can’t tell her about, and a breeze through the window that catches his sticky hair as he leans back, curled gratefully in the seat beside her. There’s night and day and more night, heavy and blue and dizzying, and something dull and salty she crumbles in her hand and gives to him bit by bit, waiting patiently for him to swallow each time. There is sand under his hands one pinkish morning and a strange weightless journey up the side of a mountain that night, his face pressed into reeking fur as the car, with him and the driver and the hungry dog inside, climbs further and further out of the world.
/ / /
The last thing she does that night is gather the thick, filthy clods of hair Toast hacked off his head while she held his gaze and his neck steady. He’s sleeping now, a dead weight in the bed that was hers all those days, and from the next room she can hear his sharp, weird snoring fill the silence. She learned the sound on the journey back from the marsh, and for some reason hearing it pulls at her side like a smile she can feel through her whole body.
She scoops the hair into a sack and sets out through the dark corridors, climbing stairs and turning corners till she comes to the steps leading out onto the wives’ roof. It’s a small balcony, open to the stars and furnished with exactly two things: a heavy woven blanket and a small fireplace. Furiosa squats down to start the fire going, poking at the tentative blaze with an old gear shaft, coaxing life out of the caked fuel. She sits back to wait, blinking up at the sky. There was a time she could put names to the stars, but that was a long time ago. She hasn’t needed to know anything but the North Star for a very long time. Knowledge you don’t use goes away, disappears as soon as you take your eye off it.
The fire’s going now, and she tosses his hair onto it, wrinkling her nose at the fizzing stench. It burns away quick enough, leaving just the sharp, ancient smell of ash.
“Furiosa?” The voice from the stairs is hesitant, almost too soft to hear, but she’s always had sharp ears. Cheedo’s standing in the doorway, a shawl clutched awkwardly around her shoulders, dark hair falling in front of her face. She’s rubbing one foot against the opposite leg, for all the world like a child seeking out her mother after a dream turned bad.
“You can come up here,” Furiosa points out gently, and Cheedo hurries up the last few steps to kneel next to the fire, lifting her head to watch the sparks fly up.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she explains, and Furiosa understands without explanation. Many things are in abundance here; sleep is not one. She thinks the last time she slept the night through was the first night they came to the Citadel.
“Is he back?” Cheedo asks, interrupting a memory Furiosa is glad to let go. “The Dag said—she told me I couldn’t go see him, and there’s that awful dog we had to wash, that’s his, isn’t it?”
Furiosa nods. “It was with him.” He’d grabbed her neck when she tried to carry him away from the dog, shook his head and waved and made sharp, urgent noises in his throat, and flatly refused to move until she held out a piece of food and brought the infested mutt bounding into the car with him.
“He’s all right, isn’t he?” Cheedo asks. “Why can’t I see him?”
“He needs to rest,” Furiosa tells her. The marks of his fingernails are still in the inside of her wrist, fresh and stinging. He found his fight after all, until Capable’s dose went down. He’ll sleep till morning, if what she said was right. Furiosa plans to go back down when the fire dies, just in case she judged the dose wrong. “Don’t worry. He’ll get better. You’ll see him.”
Cheedo hugs her legs and rests her chin on her knees, staring unblinking into the fire. “You found him,” she says softly.
“Yes,” Furiosa agrees. Her heart beats under her shirt, steady and soft for the first time since she turned the wheel of the rig eight lifetimes ago, a gentle rhythm almost too light to feel. “Yes. I did.”
/ / /
Dog is missing an eye, Max finds out when he wakes, but that’s okay. He’s a good dog still, even if Max does have him to thank for the throbbing mess on the side of his head that the red-haired girl insists on dabbing at and taping up every damn day. But that’s not Dog’s fault. He didn’t know he was hurting Max; he was just hungry. So was Max. If he’d had the chance he probably would’ve tried to eat Dog right back, so they’re square. Max lets Dog rest his scruffy head on his better knee while he sits under the shade in the garden. After a wash, he’s not even that bad looking.
The shade is a kind of tiny awning made out of a sheet hung between two ledges at the corner of the garden. The blonde girl, the skinny one, she fixed it up for him when he wandered into her green place this morning. It’s so the sun won’t get in his eyes and burn the skin off his nose, and he has to admit it’s very nice. Cool. Quiet. A good place to rest, if he needs to, and he needs to rest most of the time. Something happened to his insides. He isn’t sure what, exactly, but he’s glad it’s over, or seems to be.
“Here,” the girl calls, and before he’s had time to look up there’s something hard and round bouncing into his lap, narrowly missing Dog’s head.
“Hey,” he mouths reproachfully, and picks up what she threw at him. It’s a red lump with a stringy tail and a green top, bathed in flaky black dirt. He grunts at it, stares up at the girl, who shrugs.
“Dunno,” she tells him. “It’s food, I think. Pretty sure. Go on, try it. See if any of these green fuckers is worth anything.” Max is suspicious, but he bites cautiously into the red thing, tasting dirt and crunch and something sharp.
The girl returns his grimace. “I meant wipe it off first,” she points out, rolling her eyes in amazement at the man who eats dirt. Max shrugs, considers the red thing, and takes another bite, chewing slower. It tastes clean, even with the dirt clinging to its funny tail. He squints up and around at all the green things and wonders if every one of them has a tiny red tail. It wouldn’t be such a bad way, he thinks.
There’s a noise just outside his field of vision, and somebody whispers his name, and then she’s right next to him and even though his brain’s caught up by now he jumps a little, jostling Dog’s head and earning a sour glare from his single eye. He pats it in apology, then tilts his head and screws up his eyes to peer at her through the bewildering sunlight.
“You’re up,” she says, smile and worry together. He nods, sheepish, wondering if he wasn’t meant to. He just woke and started walking, and ended up here, and the blonde girl made him a shade.
“He just showed up,” she explains now, from behind a bush of some kind, and Max nods harder, agreeing.
She doesn’t seem to be mad, and he relaxes a little and lets her squat to check the tape over his stupid ear. “How’s your head?” she asks, and he shrugs.
“Hmmm,” he affirms, “yeah.” She runs her hand over his forehead, and he flinches back, confused, but she seems satisfied. She turns to Dog and says hello, scratching the top of his poor beaten head. Dog likes this. Max knows already. He points behind his ears, showing her where to scratch to make Dog’s tail thump on the ground, and grunts with satisfaction when she does it just right. She turns her face towards him, clean and flecked with sun, her tiny smile exactly matching the good feeling in his chest. He thinks that if this is the green place, if it’s red things with tails and her looking like this, maybe she was right about it after all.
She stands again, giving Dog one last pat, and puts her hand on the side of his face without the bandage. Something happens at the top of his head, a quick soft thing, and she straightens, dropping her hand to his shoulder.
“It’s good to have you back,” she says, in the voice that tells him she thought hard about the words before she said them. He ducks his head, nervous, warmth creeping around the back of his neck and climbing to his ears.
He rolls the red thing around in his clumsy fingers, and holds it out to her. She takes it; sunlight touching his hand.
“It’s,” he tells her, nodding hard at the tiny red lump in her palm. She waits, holding it almost reverently, and he glances around at the garden again, Dog’s head on his leg, the blonde girl muttering affectionately to her dirt, and her, her short hair glowing and her gray eyes steady even in the sun.
He swallows, grunts, shifts the frozen hinges.
“Good.”