3Nux was smiling, grinning like mad as he fueled up the Coupe. These are the memories that stick with you, burn themselves deep and never fade. I can never recall any one raid, they always bleed together into a pulsating mass which screams glory and horror together in my psyche. Sometimes I remember the smell of fires burning through everything that isn't steel or bone. It always seemed that the drums of war would sound just as I had finished a meal of white grit and the green sludge which cooks served along side it. I'd usually wind up chundering a gut full of food over the hand rails before the towering buttes of home faded over the horizon. Nux would always want to be at the head of the pack, the spear head cutting through the front line, and I lived for being the first to throw my thunder. A good driver brings you right to the action, throws you headlong into a wealth of glory. All envied our bravery, the prowess, the balls it requires to take on the worst of the enemy with no hope of anyone coming in time to cover your six, or scoop you up of you screw up and fail to die historically. We lived for battle and it never seemed that there was enough of it. Time without battle was time spent fighting boredom, and if your half-life was running out then you were fighting your own wasting corpus too. Nux would sit up some nights, fighting just to breathe, and his coughing would sink into my dreams and show me images of his cooling corpse. I could remember all of this but in no particular order. It was all tangled and each thought punctuated by Nux grinning or cringing in agony. The reeking miasma of smoke and burning trash all around us was trying to suck me down into my own head like quick sand, I even found my legs feeling too heavy to be anything but sluggish on the pedals.
We used to do this, Nux and I. We used to paint up thick in our whites and roam the country, slinging fire, tearing down walls of steel and razor wire to pillage the treasures hidden behind. The imperators would take things which would please our deity and we took our own trophies. As if it had been yesterday, I relived a dozen separate memories of kneeling and grinding my knees into the spine of a captive enemy and the skull-splitting smile stretching Nux's face while he brandished his boot knife. He used to slice the ears from the skulls of enemy drivers he felt had been worthy opponents, and sometimes they would still be alive when he started the cutting so I would hold them still, wearing a grin of my own.
I could very clearly remember what it was like to be on the side of victory, not what it's like to be a bystander watching the devastation unfold. It's a shock, to wonder if you still had a place to camp. Did they hit the cave? And who are they? I've never felt so small, so easy to annihilate, and somehow in spite of this, I was racing toward the most exposed territory of them all, Wilson's. The the only reason Wilson could camp where he did was the fact that everyone knew they'd be fucking themselves if they killed him. Who would do this? And why was I taking myself and the nutter to find out? Was I insane? No more insane than Dune. She was loading five into the magazine and throwing back the roof hatch to scan horizons with her scope. I wanted to grab her by the belt and drag her back down into the car. This feels wrong. I should have been the one looking with thunder in hand and her protected in the cab because that's the way it had always been with me. Nux had always been protected inside, I was always the one who was okay with being the first to eat a bullet. Life is easier that way, knowing that you will always be the first one to hurt, not the fuck-heads you give a shit about. Well, I wound up with one hand on the wheel and the other pulling on her belt to get her back down into the cab as we passed territory after territory giving off dark clouds from burning tires and the kind of barbecue you shouldn't eat. You could smell it, acrid, sharp, sometimes savory, and reek kept taking me back to the sound of war. Garbled war chants, choking smog from exhaust fumes, the sound of dying wails and the fleeing sense of self which comes with crushing life flat under boot and tire treads. I used to relish this, maybe I still would and that's the part which felt so strange. Adrenaline is a hell of a thing, and you crave it like fume and bunk-funk. Maybe that's why I was headed into the heart of Scav Country in ruin, for that hit of nitro that the little things on top of your kidneys pump out when you're scared shitless and too dumb to realize it. Once Dune was back inside, I reached up to slam the roof hatch closed. What am I doing?
"Stay inside," I demanded and she scoffed as she lifted her long-lookers to peer out through the windows. Yeah, maybe the glass wasn't bullet proof, but I wasn't having her be the first target to shoot at.
We were still too far out to see if there was smoke coming up from our patch, not that there would be any need to burn anything or cause much damage when it probably looked abandoned. The reality is, if you were a part of a group collecting valuables and burning down settlements, you would probably settle yourself at Dune's caverns if you came across it. It's sheltered, there's water, there's only one way inside. Reason was sinking in. Sure, I was a junkie for that nitro in the blood, but we had something to lose in Wilson, the basic necessity of an organic mechanic. Our flame chewed flesh needed the occasional tune-up, and the likelihood of falling out from the heat with patches of skin which won't sweat anymore is high. Not to mention all of that slime he sold the nutter to keep our gnarled up hide from drying out.
"Ducky? Slit? Shit SHIT!"
Dune's squawking in fright pulled me out of my head. The next sound to enter my good ear was the deafening shrieks of rat rod motors and cycles. We were driving parallel to a long stretch of hillside, riding down the trough between two humps of red earth and sheets of rock shed by the crumbling mountains. What we were hearing was the sound of Rock Riders, just on the other side of the hill. I know this path, it narrows to from two passages to one between the hills in a fork, and it was too late to slow down and let the Rock Riders race ahead of us. If I broke now, We'd block the dirt road right at the fork and have any number of bikes crash into us. I didn't want to experience being outnumbered by Rock Riders for any reason. Certainly, I'd rather not be responsible for their rides being destroyed and face that kind of wrath, too. Dune could only shoot so many within a minute. All that could be done was maintain speed and wait to see what damage would be done.
Four emerged from the other side of the fork ahead of us, another behind which had dropped from the crest of the next hill over and very nearly landed square on top. Their front tire left streaks down Shirley's trunk. Dune's rifle was up, she threw back the roof hatch and fired twice into the air. It was a signal, scav country etiquette that I'd learned while I lived with her. Two shots in the air when you're forced into close quarters with other fiercely territorial locals, two shots means something to the effect of being willing and able to skirmish but not actively looking for a fight. They were bellowing back and forth between themselves and whooping at us. One passenger was already preparing to light one of their signature Molotov bombs. I thought for a moment that the reply we were waiting for would come in the form of the bonnet set on fire.
It was the passenger of the bike stuck behind us which discharged a 22cal twice, presumably into the air. It was obvious now, I'd come out between the leader of the pack and his posse. They could have fucking spared us the wait for an answer, felt like an eternity with my nuts trying to climb back up inside me, just waiting for a bullet in the brain instead. There would be no getting around the wide angles of the Impala, he'd just have to stay back there until the road between the hills widened out which gave us more than enough time to have a close look at the Riders. All of the bikes had passengers, which was odd. Most Rock Riders preferred to ride light and covet complete maneuverability. One of the passengers was slumped over against the back of a driver, right arm hanging in an unnatural way and streaked with red. His torso was tied onto the driver with the sleeves of a studded coat. Another driver was nearly naked, wearing only boots, his undershorts, and a bandoleer. They were fleeing an attack they had not anticipated, hauling their wounded away. The moment their pack leader could, he pumped the guzz and sped around me.
"Learn to drive, Arsehole!" I heard him roar over the thrumming of the bike engine as he passed the driver side window. I showed him my favorite finger while Dune stood through the roof hatch to follow his head in her crosshairs until the entire group left our line of sight, turning down another forked road between another collection of hills toward the north.
It wasn't long then before Wilson's hill of dirt could be seen, the rolling black pouring out of his trap door entryway was like an unwholesome beacon. We circled and no one could be seen, I had been expecting to see someone. Anything. An explanation for this. Whoever had set his underground camp on fire had done it hours if not days ago, these were the dark clouds of the last embers burning out. Dune leaped from the car before it even came to a stop, it should have been predicted, and I had to lead-foot the break and run out after her. My skull meat, its gears slowed by the memory of causing madness much like this, still had enough sense not to want her near the place from which the tower of smoke was rising up. I had to clench my hands, both of them, around the collar of her vest to stop her just a few feet short of reaching the ladder leading down into Wilson's tunnels.
"Don't!" We were already coughing, choking on the noxious fumes of who knows what burning down in the old man's dirt burrow. She had to be towed back. I didn't get it. She often said that she and Wilson weren't friends, but it seemed like she had been about to dive down that hole for what would surely be smoke smothered corpse by now. "If you fall in you'll choke out and there's no way I'd get down there in time with one leg!"
Dune hacked and gagged, she'd gotten a face full of the dark clouds. We stumbled back with absolutely no grace, sliding in the loose gravel and nearly rolling down the slope of the hill on our knees.
"What if he's still in there?!" The woman bellowed at me, shoving my arms away to stand.
"There's no way, Nut-bag! If he wasn't smoked out then he's corpsed. Smoke like that kills, Moron! You wanna die in there?" I was shouting back, still disbelieving that her wits had fled so quickly at the idea that Wilson could be trapped in his own bunker. Even if he was, there was nothing we could do about it. Surely she should have known that, and surely she should have known that it wasn't worth it to risk her own skin for a man of that age with a foot already in the grave.
"But," She waved her hands in the air, almost losing her footing again on the uneven ground and side stepping to catch herself. "If he's dead who's going to fix everyone?"
A shake of the head in uncertainty was all that could be given. That's a valid thought but, not something that we could fix in any way. We should leave, now.
"We need to-" She was interrupting me. She's good at that.
"Whats that? Look," She said, pointing her finger toward the other side of Wilson's dirt mound.
There were flows of paler smoke drifting away from another place. When we gathered ourselves to walk around the mound and look, I can't say I was anything but sort of amazed. Another trap door, bigger though, lightweight, made of wooden pallets tethered together and if you skirted close enough to look into the cavernous opening, you could see patterned steel ramps. He'd had a car hidden inside his underground bunker, gassed up and ready to go, the door covered and camouflaged expertly. The loose silt around the massive opening held the tire tracks. Wide tread, good for sand. The old coot had been concealing an escape plan for who knows how long. I was a little impressed, I never knew he had a set of wheels. Dune even had the wit to see what must have transpired.
"You think he got away then?" She asked, nudging at me with an elbow. I shrugged, because who knows. He might not have gotten far at all.
The crack of thunder -and I don't men from a storm- echoed across the vast nothing toward the hills. It was coming from the Moonshiner's territory in the southeast, a place we now know is controlled or possibly allied with the Citadel. The echo from a distance caused it to sound like several more explosions than it truly was, I knew this but Dune didn't seem to. She was cursing under her breath, counting in murmurs.
"Who could have that much black magic?" She asked. Any faction with enough resources to cross the mountains and do trade with the strongholds in the Great White was the answer I could have served her, but I'd rather start hauling her back to the Impala with a hand wrapped around her bicep. No time for explaining. If the Brewer's had indeed been absorbed by Citadel War Boys, then we'd surely be seeing my own old brothers spilling out mad as dogs shitting tacks any fucking minute. I didn't want Dune to see that and the thought of being recognized under these circumstances gave me the vague feeling of nausea. Dune had to be dragged, she was trying to look about with her long-lookers. The both of us had shit for hearing, and I couldn't tell if there were engines or not approaching with my own pulse drumming in my good ear.
Something deep in the radiation sick earth groaned, like the death rattle of a great beast. At first, I stopped, not knowing what the sound was, then there was crashing, an insidious crunch that rumbled the ground beneath our feet. Dune stumbled backward into me and fell right on her ass between my flesh and metal feet. Wilson's hill was caving in, the apex crumbling down into itself and letting out a massive mushroom of black smoke. The wooden struts holding up the well-excavated tunnels must have burnt up, leaving nothing to support the tonnes of dirt and rock. We had just been standing where the earth fell into the cavernous, scorched pit. Everything was fogged with the toxic clouds. The second Dune was on her feet I grabbed her around the side of the head to wrap the Nutter's face in the denim of the jacket I still wore. Best that her full-life lungs don't take in too much of the poisonous fumes. I pushed her back into the car through the open passenger side, slammed the door and got back in on the driver side. We needed to leave, now, before the car fell into a tunnel or the fiends who did this returned to the scene of their crime to admire their own handiwork.
The windows had to be rolled down as we drove, just to clear the cab of the noxious air. Dune was hacking with her head pressed to the dash, I had to reach over and push her up toward the back rest of the seat. If something happened and I had to stop short, her face would get flattened if she was leaning over like that. The brand new wheel under my hands was being painted in splatters of my own saliva too. This was a bad day. A very very bad day.
"Why? Slit? Why is this happening? We have nothing out here, who would set everything on fire, Ducky? Duck?"
I shook my head. How would I fucking know? Yeah, I've seen plenty of the region by now and they really did have nothing left of great value that Joe hadn't already made us take before the Rock Riders established themselves at the Canyon. I didn't much understand it either. I felt the girl sliding closer until I could feel her heat against my left side, the scorched side. She must have been practically trying to crawl inside me if I could feel it so quickly. Her arms snaking around my middle like two lengths of rope tightening in a knot around me confirmed how close she was.
"I didn't expect to come home to this," She said to me.
I didn't either. Not at all. I expected a quiet week and a half of packing shit up, and in more complete honesty, this morning I was looking forward to spending our last week and a half alone, naked and randy any time we weren't strapping valuables to the car. That certainly wasn't going to fucking happen now. How could it? And how could I think anything good couldn't have been a harbinger of problems. Nothing good lasts long at all. All the comfort and goodness was just ash in my mouth now. I put an arm around the woman, chancing how the gears would grind if I pushed the engine too hard now as we headed home. V8 don't fuck me again without the courtesy of lube, not now that I'm almost over the last raw one you dealt. The drive should have taken only twenty minutes, no more than that, but it felt like I was dumping years of my waning half-life into this road home.
"You're hurting her, Ducky?" She whined against my shoulder and I rushed to release my arm and grip the gear shift instead.
No smoke to be seen from our patch yet, and we were getting close, but that meant nothing. We could find anything once we arrived. I glanced to my left to check her. She scratched at her ribs again. That was starting to worry me. Any time she slept oddly or was held too hard she'd be pushing at her chest and shifting around to sit comfortably. Nux used to do that before we knew the sickness was proliferating in him too fast to fight it. It could just as easily be a back injury, making it hurt in strange places. I certainly knew that pain. Dune had been run over once, right? Maybe it was an old wound, her old brokenness that comes back to bite sometimes. It was my nerves, I was overthinking anything my eyes spied because it might all go away very soon.
"Barrel up. Safety off." I said, making certain that she was ready for the skirmish which might greet us at her own doorstep.
She dropped her fear. It was unnerving enough to see fear on her face, an unnatural state, and worse was watching her put it away behind blank eyes and her backup firearm. It was a tiny thing, a piece kept on her ankle in a petite holster with a boot strap. It didn't have the knock-down power of the rifle, but it would be easier to maneuver inside the cab with it. If we were confronted on our own turf, a small caliber would be just as effective in close combat. My war-brain wouldn't shut up, probably not a bad thing at the moment but I could feel my pulse in my throat thanks to it. Didn't this use to be a thrill? Yeah, but it's all turned around now.
The foot of the mountains was closing in around us as we neared the destination, massive roots of rock which kept her camp so well concealed. The feel of the car as shallow dunes of sand parted under the tires was falsely reassuring. On a base level, my skull-meat wanted to be relaxed at the sight of the cave mouth and the sands blown against the walls of irregular cliffs and ledges. My good eye spotted something I'd been worried I might see, so my foot flattened the break. Dune had to throw out a hand to catch herself before she bounced off the dash. I hissed. I had to be more careful about that, or install shoulder belts...
"Ugh, are you TRYING to give a Scav a busted head?!"
"Look," I pointed ahead through the windscreen. There were deep tracks in the sand, something heavy on wheels. The cave mouth was only ten yards ahead. Someone was inside our cave.
I popped my door open to step out, the Colt in hand and ready. "Stay here," I commanded, but she was already opening her door too. It became the most purposefully quiet pissing contest I've ever had.
"Don't give Dune that 'stay here' tripe! I'm a better shot than you off my face and asleep! I'm going!"
"I don't want you hurt, Asshole!"
"Everything hurts, Slit."
"V8, fucking... Just stay behind me, then."
"No."
"Fine, whatever." There was really no stopping her, she had a point about her aim even if I was happy to ignore it, but I've seen where she comes from and it would be an exercise in futility to keep asking her to let me be a meat shield. Her small piece was put away in a stumble as she leaned down to shove it back into the holster on her boot before sliding her way out of the strap of her Enfield. She was ready, I was ready. We had the firepower, although that's no guarantee of survival, it gave us the best crack at it.
Much like the road here, the walk felt like it took eons of time I did not have to spare to this shit-box world. The moment the shade of the stone enveloped us, Dune was shoving her tinted goggles up onto her forehead so that she could see. This was our disadvantage. We could not see in the darkness after a day in the sun. I heard nothing, it was safe to assume that she could hear no stirring ahead of us either. When my eyes would let me see, what was sitting there, parked crooked in the middle of the garage chamber surprised me. I wasn't even sure of what it was. The angry scav was at my side, hissing and raising her rifle to hold against her shoulder.
"Is that a VW-mother-shitting-fuck-BUS parked in my house?" Dune knew what it was apparently. I'd never come across one before.
"I guess?" I answered, not at all sure.
It was a windowed van. Each side window boarded up with table legs, dry rotted plants and rusted wafers of scrap steel. It was pretty poorly fortified otherwise, the only praise the thing deserved was that it was smart of whoever prepped it to make it impossible to open any door but one. Too may ways to crack open a steel box is dangerous. It still had its original paint, which must have sat under the burning eye for so long that a much brighter color and glossy finish turned to rust speckled piss yellow. Dune was ready to circle toward the side doors, nudging against me with a shoulder to get me moving. She was prepared to shoot whatever could be lurking inside the strange vehicle or deeper in the cavern. Her eyes were firmly fixed upon the only door which wasn't welded shut for good, mine had drifted elsewhere, to the tires specifically.
"Wait, wait," I had to bump her arm with my knuckles and point to direct her attention. Hard thing to do when a sniper already has its beady eyes on where they'll have to train their aim. "Tire treads match whatever came up that ramp at Wilson's."
"Does that mean-"
The van's double-doors flew open and slammed against the panels of boarded windows around them without any kind of warning and the question Dune was surely about to ask was answered in a shout. Dune took aim but her finger did not clench around the trigger.
"Here I am fuckers, get it over with! I'm too old for waitin' around!" he bellowed. It was Wilson, alright. The barrel of his familiar Winchester faintly gleaming in the low light within the expansive interior of his ride as he sat up against the opposite door.
His brows rose high as he looked upon us, scrunching the deep wrinkles of his forehead until it looked like a topographical map of the surrounding region. He lowered his firearm and wheezed out a sigh of words.
"You're alive, good. You little shits almost gave me a heart attack... and messed drawers," he said, face settling into a slightly less age crumpled texture.
There were a few questions to be had but, initially, no will to voice them out loud. Wilson's fat knuckled fingers shook around a rolled scrap of earth stained paper, causing it to bob about against the flame of a lit match as he fired up for a toke. Might make those shakes worse if he was the type to get paranoid on the stuff. I've never seen him smoke and only seldom enjoyed the occasion of it myself within my half-life. I took this time to return to the Impala and pull in along side the van. Dune was half standing and half sitting against a bulge in the stony wall, scratching at her face and raking her nails against the curling overgrowth on the sides of her head. A passing thought appeared, she needed a trim too, but the thought cut off when Wilson began to talk.
"Any injuries? Bleeds or knocks?" he asked
Dune shook her head with a grunt. No, we were untouched by whoever had decided to raze everything around here to the ground. We'd cut right through the territories to Wilson's and then home like a rat fleeing through a crowd, more or less unnoticed. The Rock Riders we'd encountered also had better things to do rather than gain more wounded with another skirmish, even if they would have had our asses by sheer numbers. The old man didn't look so lucky, his head was swollen around his right eye socket and the shade of purple running under this thin old hide was a clear indication that his escape was narrow and not without exchanged blows. I was no organic mechanic, but I know enough to keep an eye on for those telling symptoms of a concussion. At least, if Wilson had gotten into a fist-cuff with whoever ransacked his bunker, he'd probably know what faction they were from.
"Who was it?" a simple and direct question.
"Storm Chasers," Wilson answered with a spit, wiping a thread of slime from his lower lip a moment later.
The Nutter and I exchanged a glace. She looked perplexed, and she'd once told me that these men, for the most part, preferred to keep to their own and only emerge from wherever they camped during rust weather. Dune could be wrong, she didn't know everything and as a hermit, she definitely wasn't an expert on the way these local groups did their wars and trade. The only time Dune ever seemed to be social was the biannual gathering which crowded around the foot of Wilson's hill, much to his great annoyance, where locals would trade and then disperse in the hours of a single morning. They called it Market Day. Dune took me to such an event once, for car parts, then we left several hours before the others vacated. I could guess why. She had dropped me off at the cavern then went back out with pockets full of ammunition, coming back several hours later with a corpse and a new ammo box. Dune wasn't a trader, she was a sniper. If she wanted something, she sat up in one of her usual spots and waited for what she wanted to pass her by, then shot the owner on his way home. The only trading she ever did was to conceal her intentions, get close and assess what her target had, and she chose her victims carefully as not to incur vengeance upon her. Other hermits were a favorite. Her skill in this area could only go so far right now. A sniper is only as useful as the distance between it and the target. These Storm Chasers were attacking on multiple fronts, probably using the strength of numbers, into territories and eliminating that distance.
"Why the hell would they have a sudden hard-on for the rest of this shit-hole?" Dune sneered, still disbelieving from the looks of it. "They never do anything."
Wilson waved a finger, hacking up billows of the foul-smelling smoke, to beckon attention while calling for a pause.
"Heard a week or two back that their battle captain bought the farm,"-he wheezed another cough and waved for another pause before going on-"Some new asshole named Ripzag took up the mantle, probably thinks he needs to have a go at everyone else to prove he's got the cajones for the job."
Dune snorted and began to twist at her hair with her left fingers. My turn to ask the questions. Now that my head was fed enough explanation to know the bare minimum of what was going on, I had the room upstairs to be irritated with it all. Every turf around us was on fire, the old coot was here on ours, and the timing of everything stinks. I had really, really been wanting that time spent with only Dune, because there would be precisely no time alone at the Citadel. That's just how life worked there. It's crowded, every surface always smelled like a dozen bodies have been sweating into it for hours, and no one has any concept of personal space, which was something I'd grown to enjoy around here. The matter of naked games being a thing for me and the lunatic now compounded my irritation further, can't picture doing that within earshot of the geezer.
"Why here? There's gotta be dozen other camps that would jump at having the only meat mechanic for twenty miles all to themselves." my tone was acid, I didn't care. I should have been grateful by the same reasoning but I couldn't bother to curb my rusted mood.
With the spit-wet joint pinched between his toothless upper gums and the few bottom teeth he had left, the old man made a lewd pumping motion with a fist at his crotch, finishing of the gesture with a flourish of the hands. Just a vulgar way of saying 'because, fuck you, that's why'.
"An I know ya shits are lyin'. You both look like dog shit. I wanna check over the both of ya animals." he crowed as he got up on his crackling legs and eased himself out of the van with a leather bag under his arm.
I looked to Dune, the swelling under her eye from where she caught my elbow and the friction rash on her arms from all the grappling in the dirt the day before was probably what got Wilson so worked up. I looked at myself, similar scuffs and bruised welts, a broken finger too. Easy to see how he could make the mistake of thinking we'd had a close encounter of the bloody kind as well. The Scavenger left her place against the wall with a curt hiss between her teeth and showed off those sharp parts as she slipped passed the organic mechanic, just to let him know the answer was a definite no. She did not seem to enjoy his medical intervention much, even if she praised it when he wasn't around. I shook my head at him, so he tossed his bag back unto the floorboards of the van through the open double doors and grumbled, 'Brats' I think he said as he rummaged about inside the vehicle.
"Hey," I heard him call, and had to move quickly to catch what he'd thrown at me. A can. One of those rations he always had stacked up all over his underground rust-pit.
We all wound up seated in a circle next to the van after a short time, watching Wilson digging around in a moldy cardboard box as he cut open cans and passed them around. I suspect he was just being smart and luring us close with food so he could look at our busted pieces.
"Don't eat anything that looks like cake. Or smells weird," he warned.
They were worthless words. All of it smelled and tasted weird to me. It's before-time grub in a neat package, none of it tasted right and the last time I ate it when Wilson sent the shit home with us after Dune was lightning struck, half of it gave me the wicked runs. Wilson began to taste test after my complaint, handing out what seemed for the most part good enough to eat. It was weird shit, some pieces chalky, others slimy, all of it retaining a kind of metallic taste from the cans or plastic it sat in for twenty years or more. Dune fetched some cola, made a big fuss over not being able to diligently collect the flows for more than a month, and we also ate up the rest of what Ard's group sent back with us. All the dried stuff was boiled soft for Wilson's benefit. I swear that she had threatened to knock the rest of his teeth out at some point over the past thirty or forty days, what happened to that fury?
Wilson somehow convinced Dune to wear a cold wet rag under her eye for the swelling, and next to a weak fire between the van and the Impala we told Wilson where we planned to go and he told us all news he'd heard since he last saw us. It had been a few months, so he had plenty to say of what injuries other locals had come to him with and how the conflict in the area had been building for some time between different groups until there was a small skirmish in the west near the mouth of the canyon. He thinks that's the battle which got the Storm Chaser's old battle captain cut down. He thought he'd like to go with us, said he didn't have much left to stay for. The old man and the sniper chattering on about the Storm Chasers was illuminating. I'd never heard much about them because like Dune said, they don't typically do much anyway. She only ever saw them when they crawled out of their camps to drive directly into storms like the fatally insane. Wilson said they were cannibals, which wasn't so big a crime, but the near obligate cannibal lifestyle was a worrisome thing. Wilson said the only reason he sees them in his territory was for what he called 'nutritional deficiencies' which, according to him, was no easy thing to remedy in a place where green refuses to grow. Dune, she was a known cannibal. While I never partook, once or twice, I'd seen her cook up parts of her victims before resigning their ultimate fate to the maggot farm. She was just trying to survive, Wilson made it sound as if these Storm fuckers thought they could absorb a man's power by eating him. It certainly put a new spin on what few words I had heard about them in my time around the loon.
"How long till you're supposed to meet the others?" Wilson asked after the previous talks had fallen into an idle silence.
"Week and a half," Dune told him, lips muffled around the back of her middle knuckle. Reflex, had to reach over and stop her from chewing her right hand open. Fuck, she did that all the time now. Didn't do that before the lightning. Or maybe she did and my stupid ass never noticed.
"We came back to pack up anything worth trading." I supplied, finishing her answer.
The man nodded, scratching through the gray shoe brush on his chin. "I was out like a light when you kids turned up. Thought you vacated when I first got here. I tell ya, I was pretty sore about that. Wondered if one of ya kicked the bucket an' the other took off... Been keepin' watch for the last two days. I was the first one they decided to mow down. Didn't act too apt to knock me off but it seemed like they wanted to make damn sure there was nothing left there to salvage. Bagged what they could. Lit up the rest. Mmm, just the three of us 'round this fire know the exact dot on the map where this here spot sits. I figure, so long as we keep an eye on, might be able to wait out the week an' see if the joint cools down. Maybe the sand breathers won't bother over here. Not like there's much to be seen from the outside to bait um in. You've been good about keeping a low profile, kiddo. Yir mom would be proud."
Dunes eyes flickered up from the fire as she peered at the old man. I won't try to imagine whatever she was thinking, the look on her face said enough of her confused head. She stared off into space toward the passage out of the caverns as she pulled her hand away from mine. Her lips were moving as if she were speaking, but she made no sound at first.
"With three people we can keep a look out. Eight-hour watches, take turns, sleep and pack between shifts." she declared, finally. It made sense so we all agreed.
Wilson plucked out some loose threads from his sleeve and we drew straws with them. Dune was to take watch first, next Wilson, then me. There was only one place you could have a good vantage point from high ground while keeping an eye on the pathway toward the cave mouth. You had to climb up the crevices and through a few of the natural, though narrow, passages toward where Dune kept the maggot farm, far from where she had to smell it and where the flies outside would. You crawl out through the spot where the stone had fallen away in crumbles over V8 knows how many years and you could sit out on a shelf of rock. This world is so screwed, seemed like even the mountains and land marks were slowly dying. Wilson supplied a folding chair to use out there while we took our turns. I was pretty relieved that I didn't have to drag that thing through the squeezes. Getting myself and the damn leg to the maggot farm was pain enough when it was my turn to clean the stink-hole. We debated whether to try barricading the entrance or not. Filling the passage with crap wasn't something I wanted to spend the effort on, it would also make it a bitch to get out if we had to bolt. The easiest thing to do was pull the van up against the way out as tight as we could get it. At least that provided an obstacle, a two-second advantage. Once it was parked with the working door facing inward and open so that Wilson could sit half inside it, Dune began to wordlessly wander toward the climbs and crude ladders leading toward the maggot farm.
"Wait," I called, "What should I be loading in the car?"
She shrugged, eyes looking wrong and posture slumped as she said: "Gonna be tradin' shit to Citadel folk. Yeah? No? War Boys. You were- or are a War Boy. You'd know what they want. Figure it out."
"Thanks for being specific," I muttered.
"What?" The scav snapped.
"Nothing," and that was the end of the discussion.
We were on edge, couldn't be helped. I watched her go, taking her rifle and long-lookers along with her. I had nothing to do but pick a pile of junk and start digging. One look around this place and it's easy to see that it's nothing but a fucktangle of miscellaneous shit, some of it garbage you could re-purpose which would be why Dune and presumably her mother kept it and dragged it to this homestead. Things you don't have to dump hours of effort into were intermingled in the piles and collections of crap. Even this shallow cave chamber had the appearance of a crows nest, just stuff that a neurotic bird picked up and took home just because it caught her eye. There were tools, which were useful things, and I'd pack some for my own uses if the Impala needed repairs somewhere along the journey. Couldn't take them all, though, because it wouldn't be worth the extra weight. Boys back home were well stocked in that area, anyway. It did not take long to find a bag with no holes in it, it was a heavy canvas, and throw in what I thought I'd like to have in case we broke down. There were already wrenches and what-have-yous scattered about in the trunk and on the floorboards from the trip to the Green Place. Those were sorted into the bag proper. This killed all of twenty minutes. Wilson eventually worked up the nerve to sidle up to one of the piles.
"Mind if I-" he started, only to be interrupted.
"I don't give a shit, she probably doesn't either," I snorted while he began poking though and turning items over to inspect them.
I could potentially locate most of the ammunition Dune had hidden throughout the cave, set that aside somewhere to let her sort it, but there was a strong urge to be unhelpful after being snapped at. She had suggested that I find something to please my own kind anyway as if she had anything that would. Living out here fast made me realize that, yes, while we were raised to die for a man who was probably lying, we were also spoilt for parts and materials for tinkering in mechanics. Sure, they'd appreciate the metals but that was another issue of weight. Weight means guzzling more fuel, so we couldn't be hauling tonnes of scrap metal across Scav Country, The Mountains, The Dunes, The Dead Barrens. Couldn't do it. Dune probably had a better idea of what actually had value. It felt like it would be much easier to do this together. Together. That word left an unsettling sensation deep in my guts as it passed through my head meat.
That morning had been great, epic even. I had woken up to the heat of her body sprawled over mine, dead set on getting her out of her threads again if I could, and had been deeply gratified every time I had my hands on her. I finally got what Crank was droning on about with all of his sickly soft talk about his harpy. I liked it, trading paint out of hiding and with somebody I actually knew, not a nameless, faceless stranger. Sure, it brought the same anticipatory rush of terror and awe as moments when you think you might have to spray a slick of chrome on your teeth, but it was worth it. I won't lie, I wanted more of that feeling and to be rightly attached to the imp of I could get away with it, but everything got bent out of shape as soon as she had those crazy eyeballs of hers in the long lookers to see what was happening here in the west. This day had gone from the highest high, as if I'd been up all night huffing paint, down to the lowest pit, a come-down to smash all others. This was supposed to be a week and a half to ourselves, to get shit done and laze the rest away doing whatever the hell we wanted to, together. That word still left a new and weird taste in my mouth.
We were home, but I was righteously anxious, irritated, and, inexplicably, unbearably fucking horny. That wasn't new to me. As I've said before, back at the Citadel one fights boredom on a near daily basis and each of the listed states of mind is a common symptom of the bored. This was different, it was an aggravated boredom because no matter how much I sifted and dug around in the detritus of Dune's life as a scavenger thief, the pile of junk to take with us stayed small. Assorted gun parts, a couple moldy word burgers -Joe seemed to think they were important and had all stacks of paper with words scrawled on them collected by his imperators into some sort of repository- and any jugs which still had their caps. I could fill a bunch of them up, get started on bottling the water we'd told the others we could bring to help keep every mouth wet. It was another way to piss away the time without wasting it, so I fed a length of frayed nylon rope through any jugs with handles and tied it off in a loop to throw over my shoulder as I went down into the deeper reaches with an oil torch. There were only a few spots where the walls got damp, in that chamber I called my garage where the caved in roof let outside air and sunlight in to evaporate the dampness before it could even slither its way to the ground, then in the interior where we slept, there was one spot where it would drip at a fair pace, fast enough to fill a five-gallon bucket in maybe forty-eight hours? It's what made Dune's territory worth keeping secret.
Our things were exactly where we left them before departing for her birthplace almost two months ago. Everything but her corpse of a mother, I couldn't see this fact because no lamp was lit in that corner to light the place up, but we took her with us and buried her next to the place she'd raised Dune.
In caves, for whatever reason, you don't get much dust. I expected to find a film of it coating everything, but there wasn't. The buckets and basins she used to catch the steady drops was once a mere large wash bucket or two. I had improved that after several months of living here, set up a system where containers and buckets were stacked like a slightly tilted staircase of five, that way when the top bucket fills it will drip its overflow into the one under it and so on and so forth. Usually, we only managed to let two fill before Dune decided to use it for scrubbing out duds and us too. All five pans and buckets were filled to the brim -probably by the time we'd been gone a week- and had since overflowed. Thankfully the slow stream of wetness had run away from the bedding, though it appeared to be pooling under a yet another assemblage of Dune's scrap and rubbish. You could smell something faintly metallic and see the rust beginning to show on things near the bottom. It always had a smell if it got wet over here. No matter, I ignored the pool under the pile and focused on the task I had assigned myself to. I poured out the first few inches of water, gave it a swish and swallow to test that it wasn't stagnant, then set myself to work dunking the opened jugs in and letting them fill up before replacing the caps. We could put the water in Wilson's van. If he wanted to tag along he was driving his own damn rig. If I couldn't get privacy at home with the nutter, then I'd have to settle for having it in the car on the trip at night. Fuck, it wasn't as if I was unaccustomed to that sleeping arrangement after so damn long with the Crow Fishers. The thought reminded me of the night before in the car, for some reason that only antagonized my irritability.
Getting rough on the hand-break is known to bluntly knock the edge off of bored and anxious, but taking advantage of the fact that I was alone down here achieved nothing but leaving me feeling disgusting and tired. Time crawled like a dried out wretch. The "take pile" as it would come to be called didn't grow much. Wilson took the aqua-cola I brought back up to store it in the van. Inside his ride, I could see that he'd brought some measure of his trade with him, medical supplies. Honestly, that was what probably had the most value around here, Wilson's stuff and the fact that he knew how to use it. I brought Dune one of the newly filled jugs of cola around the middle of her shift. At some point, I had to accept the fact that I had spent a little less than seven hours accomplishing fuck-all. I tried sleeping so that my coming shift wouldn't be spent fighting my own eyes trying to droop closed. I didn't find resting any easier than gathering goods.
Time passed slowly, but it did pass. Not long after I told Wilson we should bed down near the cars and l put myself down for a few hours of shuteye, could hear Dune on her way down from the surface. Her boots clumping and her right toe catching on the rock slightly as she moved, she was clearly tired what with her right leg listing. The fact that she was coming down meant that Wilson was now on watch and he'd be out there with eyes open for eight hours. Dune stumbled to the mats, almost stepped on me, then sat and began untying her boots.
"Awake already, Fucker?" Casual greeting, just like always. Everything was different but nothing had changed. I had no idea that I could miss somebody I had last seen only eight hours prior.
"Still awake." I had not actually slept.
I'd been laying there, unable to keep my damn eyes closed, thinking about what could be done if any of us actually saw something on our watch. I supposed we could throw ourselves into the nearest vehicle and haul ass. Where to, though? That was the looming uncertainty. Wilson's was fucked, that's where everyone around this dust bowl used to go to regroup after a disaster to figure out what the hell to do. There was no neutral territory now, and to hear Wilson tell it, that had been the intention the hostiles.
"Dreams or nerves?" she asked.
"Take your pick. They're interchangeable parts." I answered, to which she sighed.
"Ya need sleep, gotta have those pretty peepers open when it's your turn to be lookin' out. Dune'll get ya down for a few winks."
And that shrill voice in the back of my head which had first woken in the morning after our night by The Lookout smacked its dry lips at her offer. "The fun way or..."
I was jabbed by cold fingers hard in the tender spot under the arm pit for that. "The usual way, Arse,"
If only the fun way was the usual way. It could have been if I wasn't such a rust bucket that Dune thought she had to treat like a milk sucker for two years. There's the good ol' voice I was used to. A marriage of my own shitty inner monologue and every voice I had to listen to declaring me too mediocre to be useful when I was hip high. Dune hadn't exactly meant to do what she did, though, and had the balls to admit she was wrong about it. I'll own the fact that I gave her a few reasons to treat me like that too, though I confess that I had no fucking clue it was happening because I'd never encountered it before. I don't know that War Pups are even treated like infants when they are. Tried not to think too hard on all of this while she stripped herself down to a hole-riddled sleeveless shirt and pants rendered loose on her without a belt, I found mixed success.
"Shouldn't take all that off. Gonna run to the car with your pants hanging around your knees when storm chasers swarm us?"
She grabbed her boots, vest, and belts and stood with her effects under one arm while the other hand was busy holding her waistband up. She limped over to the car and chucked it all through the open passenger window. Her posture said 'irritated'.
"There," she huffed. "Dune'll put it on in the car if they come."
She was tired and moody. Moody ahead of schedule. Well, that fun shit we did a night ago definitely wasn't happening. Now it was just a count down to finding her pissed off and curled up somewhere dark like a snake with a fangy mouth full of venom. I've been stupid enough to reach into that den and mess around with the snake before, I wasn't about to try and undress it. I should have been thankful. If she had the chance to get through her monthly week of 'Fuck off, War Cuck' ahead of schedule then I wouldn't have to be trapped in a car on a long trip with that later. My idiotic, shrill little inner voice was incensed at the timing of this routine event happening well out of routine. That dumb voice in charge of my lower half seriously thought it was a tragedy. It was like it didn't care that I had just been spared the trauma, Dune had been spared too, we had all been spared the agony of dealing with this in a hot car. But the moron in me had the ego and the evident self-centeredness to be annoyed that there would be no chance until a few days before we left. Even then, when you really think about it, fun of any sort should be the last thing on your mind when the entire region you live in is being pillaged. Maybe I was too familiar with chaos to be rightfully wary of it. I would be told in later years that I had been conditioned to be desensitized. War and bloodshed is hardtack and cola to anything raised up within the tunnels of the Citadel's War Tower. Dune, none too gently, shoved my head and shoulders forward to seat herself under me and dropped my head onto the meat of her left thigh.
"The hell are you scowlin' about?" she muttered before dragging her fingers over my face.
Even if her shine hand didn't feel so shine as usual with her sour mood, it still pushed my own rubbish mood right out of me. With time, her shine hand quit being all scraping nails and the pull of sweat sticky fingers against stubble. She got soft again, and her fingers slowed to lazy half circles prodding their way around my head.
"Slit, I'm scared," and after her words, I could feel her shudder.
I knew why, yet still, I asked. And when I said that simple word "Why?" she looked down at me and she almost seemed sane. She hurt all over, she told me this. I suspected that it could have something to do with the hurt she always had for a week out of every month but to look at her it seemed to be more than just that.
"How are we supposed to get them all across Scav Country now, Ducky? How?" She whimpered as she curled over unto her side next to me. It was a good question. Crank knew the risks, knew what could happen, it was his job to prepare them all for it, not me, certainly not Dune. It wasn't her responsibility to be accountable for what might happen. It never was. I took her to the Green Place, which ended in this ludicrous promise of a journey to the place I came from. This was never her burden. It was mine, and my job to prepare her for it.
"You should be." it was a clumsy admission which had her looking at me with fear in her eyes. Fear is good, it's normal, its' guzz for the war to come. I still hated seeing her afraid. "If everybody got there in one piece, even if Scav Country wasn't burning, I'd call it a bloody miracle."
"So... You're saying you don't think everyone is going to make it."
I had never seen it before, evidence in her flesh that she was truly from some idyllic paradise. Did she really think it was possible for everyone to survive this? She was always an optimist to a maddening degree. Her Green Place could be why.
"I'm saying, I know we won't all make it."
"Slit-"
"Hey, shoot first, ask questions later. Remember that. No one is safe, and no one can be trusted. That's how you survive. Don't ask. Just shoot." I said it because she was good at that, maybe it was something she could understand.
She only seemed to ball up tighter, folding over on herself like a jack knife. I pulled myself up the length of the mats and her down them so that we were truly next to each other. I tried to look at her face, but she curled up more. All I had to look at was the top of her head.
"Dune," I didn't know what to say from there. I used to not care. I used to be able to say anything and not give a damn how words could cut through people. It's still better than mincing the truth. I think I had ruined her chances at sleep too.
"I don't want it to end up like it did the last time." she murmured flatly.
I didn't get it, not until she flexed her right hand of scars. It then occurred to me that the last caravan she was with was met disaster, and then she was shackled before being mutilated. I needed to move, to do something, anything but dive into that story with her. It's one thing hearing an old man tell it, seeing her face while she recalled it would be something else entirely. Something which might convince me to blow off Crank and let them make the journey on their own.
"We reek. Let's wash." I said. I know she uses this tactic on me, and I know it works. She needed to be distracted.
She produced the most pitiable bleating noise when I pulled her up by the wrist. We hadn't really done much washing since before we left her green place and forgot about it by the time we arrived here, far too preoccupied with the idea of being invaded and murdered by storm worshiping cannibals to be bothered with concepts like personal hygiene. Often, she was the one who demanded that we must bathe, that the smell of our funk was making her want to retch. I know she didn't expect me to steer her toward the interior, where we had always slept, ate, bathed, and know she didn't expect me to care, because I certainly didn't expect to either.
This place had its comforts in familiarity, our combined stink which had saturated into the very stone, what could feel like countless nights spent listening to each other snore though the night if not for the marks she left on the walls to count days. That's the first thing she did, forgetting that we were there to wash. We wouldn't even be here long, we might not ever come back, but she appeared compelled to scratch her marks in the wall. The days kept crawling closer to three years as she scratched. I watched her diligently count, sometimes stopping to remember and do the math. I don't know how she always managed to keep track.
I wasn't sure if she was finished, she was just standing there, swaying on her feet and searching her wall of time with half closed eyes. I took the worn stone from her hand, and she took this as her cue to seat herself to disrobe completely. We both did. I think she was surprised when I touched her with cool, wet cloth. She looked at me as if she was startled, but leaned closer and ducked her head for me to drag the damp rag over her mess of hair. She usually kept it rather short on the sides, it hadn't been cut in months and allowed to form springy curls where her worrying fingers hadn't twisted and tangled them to locked pleats. If you pulled on them, they would bounce back.
It was a lazy moment, scrubbing away the layers of filth after days spent sweating ourselves soaked in a black car which absorbed heat even on a cold morning. She leaned heavily, damp face pressed somewhere between my collar bone and where my bloodpump pulsed while she reached around my side with her rag, sluggardly, to wipe the dust and grime out of the scars I find it hard to reach. We scarcely bothered to pull on reasonably clean grundies before further lazing about on old sleep mats and the piles of rubbish serving as bunks. All I wanted, in that particular moment, was for her to sleep deeply and forget everything for just a short time. Long-term wants are different, complicated, far away. I wanted a guarantee that she wouldn't be alone in this damn cavern when I inevitably carked it before her. That's the upper limit of what I could want beyond base, fleshy needs. I just didn't want her alone in here for the rest of her full-life. That's too long. Covered by a thin sheet of wear soft canvas, she sang softly next to my good ear. I tried to truly hear the words, make sense of them, but they inherently made no sense at all despite the pleasing nature of the tune.
"What's Africa?" I asked, and she laughed out a simple response 'dunno'. "What's rain?" I tried another word I'd never heard.
She seemed to shift herself to get closer, pulling the cord linking our hands as she moved. "It's water, Ducky. Water that falls. Dune suspects it feels something like... Err. When we're close. When it feels like you're all over. Maybe. Dunno."
I fell asleep trying to undo her ever more senseless words and rearrange them to work in my head. I never solved that puzzle, but I slept soundly, dreamt of the smell of her freshly washed skin.
The frustration of my lower half was forgotten when I woke. The scavenger, Dune, was trying to get up. This was the first instance in a long while that her sleeping body got up with real intention to dream walk. She was trying to stand and my dead weight caused her to lose her footing, falling in a twisting motion to land hard on her hip. The yanking on my arm and her disoriented jabbering were what woke me. Her blood shot eyes told me what had happened, what was still happening to her. She looked disturbed by whatever she was still dreaming as I took off my half of the cord and grasped her around the waist to haul her over my lying corpus. I settled her between me and the wall, and she kept trying to turn over in my arms or crane her head up to look at something. Her legs wroth too, like she thought she was walking. It takes time to get her to either wake or fall back into deeper sleep. She had to be held tightly, told she was dreaming. In a short period of months, I had become good at this. If her dream was persisting, I had to lean heavier on her, hook my calf around her knees, repeat myself into her ear and against her jaw that she needed to wake up. If there were tears and whimpering too, I had no choice but to park my pride and get soft. By that time it was getting easier to do that too, telling her that she was alright, that I was there. I wondered if I should have been doing that for Nux. He never walked in his sleep or did anything like that, but sometimes he'd wake up tense, clutching a blade or my blender wrenches in his fist. There are a hundred reasons for any War Boy to do that, but I could have done more than simply roll over and go on sleeping. I thought sleeping back to back would be enough, eyes looking both ways, that sort of thing. He probably needed more than that, I might have needed more too. I've always had shit dreams.
This was a bad one. Sometimes she'd say things that made me wonder just what she was dreaming. She's called out names before, called for her mother, shrieked when touched, or alternatively grasped tightly at whatever touches her. One time she sat up despite my grip on her climbed into my lap. That was before the not-so-green place, and it was so freakish that I had shoved her off me. Funny how that wouldn't bother me anymore. This time, she was just being stubborn, whatever images gripped her brain weren't letting her go easily. Minutes passed and her arms had to be folded over her chest and squeezed between us while I held her. She had been trying to claw her way free. Waking her too suddenly can be dangerous, could get a fist in the mouth or her teeth savaging that big bleeder in the neck, which was where her face happened to end up near as she struggled. There was something inherently unpleasant about having to do this while the both of us were nearly naked and when she stated crying to be let go, that only made it worse. That made half digested MRE gruel rise up my throat. My skull meat immediately replayed the scene where I had found Wrecker looming insidiously over Nux.
"Dune, wake up. I'm not trying to- Nut-bag? Please."
Her pleading and ragged breaths quieted with another few rounds of insisting that she had to pull herself out of the dream. She moaned, clicked her teeth together and twisted her fists between us. When I pulled back to see that she truly was awake, the fact that she was looking right at me confirmed it. She sat up the instant I let go and examined her wrists. She clasped her scarred hand around the left and rotated the joint.
"What.. Uh.. Was it." This was the first time I had ever bothered to ask what she was dreaming after she had a fit like that. So she looked at where I lay with some confusion, maybe distrust.
"The dream?"
I nodded, and she shook her head as if refusing to speak although she did anyway, managing somehow to explain in a single word. "Shackles."
An old memory replaying in her head. Well, it wasn't what I worried she might have been dreaming, but it was a harsh reminder that she could easily have been the plaything of a man far more dangerous than Wrecker. Wrecker was offed by a pup a little under four thousand days who was stupidly lucky, Scrotus was killing his adult sparring instructors and Imperators on violent whims by that same age. I used to admire the mad man for his near god-like prowess in battle, to a point I still do, but imagining Dune at his whim was nothing less than a waking nightmare. Dune must have realized what kind of hell she narrowly escaped, but that doesn't nullify the kind of wretchedness whose story was told in her very scars.
I sat forward then, not really certain of what I was going to do about the way she was pulling her knees in and turning her left wrist over under her numbed gaze. She had no scars there, so I assumed that she hadn't fought the slaver's restraints too harshly years ago but maybe she could still feel them on her, the same way I sometimes still felt Wreckers blade jammed into my mouth.
My right hand hovered, lifted and nearly dropped twice when I hesitated. It was still bizarre to see and more over, touch her bare body in any way that wasn't a necessity. Couldn't touch her right, not with the thought of Wrecker's perversion still lingering in the back of my head. Her right knee seemed like a place which doesn't insinuate anything, I couldn't help feeling like I was supposed to be doing something. My nutter grasped my hand quickly, too quick for me not to assume that she meant to remove it, I pulled away only to have my fingers gripped more strongly.
"I like your hands," she said. I couldn't possibly know why and she obviously could read that on my face, so she explained it to me. "They're sturdy. Big. Kinda sweaty, though."
I shrugged at the sweat comment. Yeah, I sweat in my sleep, so what? She did too. She compared her left to mine as if she had to show me what I already knew. Dune's shine hand was smaller than mine. She was only half a head shorter than I was so my hand wasn't much longer than hers, but her bones certainly seemed thinner. When I really looked I found it hard to believe she could throw a punch without snapping those skinny little hand bones. It was a distraction we both needed. We rose and dressed shortly after she dropped my hand. I found Wilson sleeping on the job, couldn't bitch much, he'd been up there longer than the eight-hour shift.
