Archive of Our Own ^beta

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He isn’t quite sure how this all happened. He knows he must have been alive at one point, probably had friends and family and maybe even a job, but he doesn’t remember any of that now. There are others like him, he knows that, but as far as he’s aware they don’t know how this happened either. If he had ever been much of a talker, he certainly isn’t now, and most of the others barely seem capable of speech. Groans and grunts are about the extent of their minimal communication with each other, on the rare chances that he happens across one.

The one thing he does know is that life (or unlife, he supposes) isn’t that easy out here. There aren’t a whole lot of dead like him, and not a whole lot of living left, either. The living that do remain tend to keep themselves pretty well defended. Some are enclosed within walls, some hide out in landscapes that aren’t particularly easy to traverse when you’re dead, and the ones that aren’t hiding in safety move through the wastes in modified, armored cars, often hunting the dead for sport.

His kind used to congregate around cities and towns, any collection of people they could prey on, but bit by bit they had picked them off, until the dead were forced to wander in search of what living might remain. Many groups found nothing, and probably withered and died out in the desert without the flesh of the living to sustain them, and many others were picked off by roaming bands of living. He himself had been shot and run over more times than he could count anymore, but he discovered it was easy to pretend you were completely dead when you were already mostly dead, and later found that staying away from groups of his own kind tended to be safer. A shambling herd of corpses was hard to hide (often too stupid to hide as well) and made an easy target, whereas a single dead man on his own was less likely to attract attention and it was much easier to duck away if he heard vehicles coming. Plus, on the rare occasions he caught a person (or animal, or honestly just found anything dead) he didn’t have to fight over it with other corpses. It was all his, and he could hide out and live off it for as long as it lasted.

And so he wanders, waiting and searching for the next meal to come along, just trying to survive even when the odds are mostly against him.

When he’s discovered by a group of living he assumes are roaming hunters, he hopes they’re bad shots and gets ready to play dead-dead as they start to zoom around him. Strangely enough, not a single one fires shots, but they stop their vehicles in a circle around him, and climb out to fight him by hand. They look a little dead themselves, pale and painted up like skeletons, but he knows the scent of the living when he smells it.

They seem to have this down to a routine, one baiting him in front while another tackles him from behind, and sooner than he knows it, he’s on the ground, arms behind his back, and they’re fitting a metal muzzle over his head.

A corpse is hardly a threat to the living if it can’t bite, and he knows this, but he’s just hungry enough to lunge and snap his teeth at them when they let him back up. They fight him off for a while, seeming to have fun with it more than anything, but eventually one drags him back by the chain on his muzzle and hitches him up to the back of one of their cars.

They drive away slowly, a few on the back yelling at him and baiting him as they move, drawing him forward by the deep hunger that he feels in his bones more than his stomach. He keeps up for a little while, stumbling forward as quickly as he can, but when he loses his footing and falls, none of them seem to care, and they continue to drag him along behind them.

His clothes are even more torn up than usual when they finally stop, but he’s only missing a bit of skin and is generally glad he doesn’t feel pain anymore because that probably would have hurt. They hold his chain leash tight and the ground under them suddenly lifts into the air, carrying him and the living men and a couple cars with it. It takes him a while to orient and realize it’s a lift. They bring him up into a massive, natural stone tower and then lead him, laughing and taunting and shoving all the while, through numerous tunnels until they reach a room where they fight him to the ground again, chain his feet together, and hoist him up into the air. He’s so beyond overwhelmed by everything going on around him, his brain mostly processing it but his body hardly able to keep up with what he wants it to do, that he doesn’t manage to put up much of a fight. He’s mostly disappointed that the muzzle means he can’t manage even a single bite, despite his desperate need for sustenance.

They leave him hanging like that, and he heaves a raspy sigh. He doesn’t know what they want with him, but he doesn’t anticipate that it’s going to involve feeding him.

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Furiosa sighs. She hates going to the Blood Shed because that’s where the Organic Mechanic works on his ‘cure.’ Zombies may be just mindless corpses, but they were people once, and what the Organic Mechanic does to them is sick, even to her numbed sensibilities. She’ll shoot one in the head any day to defend herself, but at least she doesn’t experiment on them.

It’s bad enough that one of her duties is to keep them alive long enough for him to work on them. Sometimes the War Boys wrangle in an entire group of them, but there are periods where sightings of the dead in this territory are few and far between, and it would be a waste to let any of the ones they have simply wither away, at least before the Organic gets to them. And of course Joe thought she would be the perfect person to handle them. Who better than someone with a metal arm, who can grab a corpse and easily subdue it without worrying about getting a hand bitten?

She’s glad that at least the Organic isn’t cutting one open again when she gets there this time, but he does have one tied down to a makeshift table. It groans and tries to get up, seeming to not be aware that its limbs are bound, as he slowly injects something into it. Furiosa walks past the row of others hanging by their feet and tries not to look at them as they move and groan and snap their teeth at her. One hangs completely motionless, though, and she can’t help but stop and glance at it, thinking at first that it must have expired.

It stares at her, eyes unblinking but somehow still alive in their own way. She’d almost say they hold a look of fear if she didn’t know better. She doesn’t recognize this one, a scruffy thing in a leather jacket with a higher than average number of old bullet and knife wounds. It must have been brought in recently. The corpse moves, just the slightest bit, a little grunt coming from it but nothing more, and she shakes her head. Something’s wrong with that one. Maybe Organic has already experimented on it. Maybe one of his random guesses finally did something.

She turns her mind back to the task at hand. “Latest shipment from Gastown,” she says to the Mechanic as she strides toward him and holds out the small crate of clinking glass bottles she had received on her recent trade run. More rare chemicals and medications to try on his dead test subjects, she guesses.

She never believed for an instant that Joe ordered him to find a cure because he wants to save humanity, and the day she put together that the tyrant had been bitten, it all made sense. She’s not supposed to know, of course. She’s sure he’s told nobody but the Organic Mechanic and the Prime Imperator. He’d lose control of his little empire if more people knew.

She’s pretty sure the only thing keeping him from turning into one of them (she glances over her shoulder at the writhing, groaning dead and shudders) is the medication the Organic Mechanic gives him every day, probably something left from the Before Times, developed before everything went completely to hell, to keep a person human after a bite. But the Organic Mechanic has gotten a little more fervent in his experimentation lately, and Furiosa guesses that the supply of old world medication Joe is taking is starting to run out. Truth be told, she looks forward to the day he turns into a corpse and she can shoot him in the head. In the mean time, she keeps her expression stony, pretends to be loyal, and does her job.

The Organic Mechanic is looking eagerly through the crate, glancing up now and then at the row of hanging dead, probably deciding which one is going to get which treatment. Furiosa turns away, her task done. The living men hanging by their feet and stuffed into cages to be bled for Joe’s War Boys aren’t much more comforting than the dead.

“Feeding time tomorrow,” the Organic reminds her off-handedly as she starts to walk away.

Furiosa pauses only briefly. “I know my job,” she says with a forced calm. She continues on, but can’t help but look at the new corpse as it stares at her again. She stops. “Did you do something to this one?” She points to it.

The Organic Mechanic looks up again. “Hm? Just got that one in yesterday, haven’t touched it yet.”

Furiosa steps toward it. It watches, but doesn’t move. She reaches for it, and it doesn’t even snap its teeth. “There’s something wrong with it,” she comments. The others around her groan in desperation and try to reach her. “Take this one down,” she orders of a nearby War Boy. “I’m putting it in quarantine for now.”

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He can’t help but continue to stare as she reaches toward his face with her flesh hand. Something about her entrances him, and his hunger feels, if not forgotten, at least contained. She calls to the pale men who had brought him here, and he snaps out of it as they approach. Nope, hungry. Very hungry. He swings his body forward and snaps at one, trying at the same time to pull his tied arms free to grab him, and the man nearly jumps back, despite the presence of the muzzle.

“Wait,” the woman with the metal arm says to the others, and steps toward him again. He goes still. She narrows her eyes suspiciously at him, then steps back and lets the pale ones continue their work. They bring him down to the ground and he struggles to get his teeth into one, but as soon as they have him down she steps forward again and grabs his muzzle in her metal hand and drags him up from the ground.

Her gaze on him is intense, and after he’s on his feet - half by her pulling, half by his own work - he stands still, not quite sure how to react. He can’t really identify what he’s feeling, but he’s never felt drawn to someone like this. Hell, he doesn’t even remember a time he’s met a living person and hasn’t just immediately wanted to eat them. He doesn’t think the current feeling is mutual, though.

“I think he’s afraid of you, boss,” one of the skeletal men says, but the woman shakes her head without taking her eyes away. She’s nearly glaring, trying to figure him out.

“Corpses don’t feel fear. They don’t feel anything.” She hauls him forward suddenly, and he grunts in surprise and stumbles after her.

He’s not really aware of where they’re going, instead focusing on keeping his stupid corpse feet moving and not stumbling, but eventually she stops, opens a barred metal door, and pushes him in. He turns slowly to face her again as she closes the door, and she pauses, but then clicks the lock shut firmly and yanks on it to make sure it’s not going to open again.

She stares at him a moment longer, and he’s suddenly drawn to say something, but in the time it takes even a single word to slowly trickle up to the surface, she shakes her head, huffs an almost frustrated sigh, and leaves. He, too, heaves a long sigh and he leans his weight against the bars next to him.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He may not particularly like killing to live, but as far as he and his way of life are concerned, the living are for eating and that’s just the way it is. So why doesn’t he want to eat her? Frankly, it’s weird, and he wonders what’s wrong with him.

She comes back the next day, and he’s lying across the floor of his cage, but he sits up as he smells not just the scent of a human approaching, but the scent of fresh blood. He barely manages to get to his feet just before she stops in front of his cage, and he leans his head against the bars in front of him and stares.

She looks a little uncomfortable, and he forces himself to blink and look away, but it’s hard to keep his eyes from drifting back toward her.

“Well, let’s hope you at least eat,” she says with a sigh, more to herself than him. With a bit of a wet thud, she drops an unrecognizable chunk of raw meat she had been carrying, then slowly unlocks the door.

He watches but doesn’t move.

She takes a breath, as if preparing herself, then opens the door and rushes inside in one smooth movement, and before he can react, she slams him up against the front of the cage and presses his chest into it. He groans a bit, but doesn’t push back. She quickly unlocks his muzzle and lifts it off his head, then unties his arms and a second later she’s back out of the cage. He simply stands there, and her brows lower over her eyes as she watches him.

She takes a step back, then leans down to pick up the meat she had dropped earlier and tosses it toward him. It lands on the ground just outside of the cage bars, easily within his reach. He looks at it blankly. He’s hungry. He knows he’s hungry. But somehow, when she’s around, it’s almost like he could forget. He crouches down and reaches through the bars toward it anyway, since she is being nice enough to offer it to him. He brings it toward him and messily squeezes it through the bars of the cage.

“Thank… you,” he says in a vague wheeze of breath, surprising himself with his ability to get not just one but two words out, but the woman doesn’t react as if she recognized the sounds as speech. He’s a little disheartened by it, if he’s being honest. It takes so much effort to get much of anything across the void that seems to exist between his mind and his body, that something like this going unnoticed is possibly the biggest disappointment he’s bothered feeling since he died.

He expects her to leave him now, but she simply takes a step back, crosses her arms, and watches him. He supposes she’ll want to make sure he actually eats it, that he’s not far gone enough to be useless for whatever that man was doing to the other dead he had. He doesn’t know if he really wants to be used for that, but at the same time, he guesses his alternative is probably target practice. It’s not like they’re just going to release him.

Also he is hungry.

He turns his back to her before he takes the first bite. He gets a feeling that watching a corpse eat doesn’t really bother her, but somehow, suddenly, it does bother him a little.

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She watches the corpse finally eat the meat she gave it, though she raises her brow when it turns its back first. Is it… modest? She shakes her head. That’s ridiculous; they don’t feel. It must just be making sure she’s not going to take its food from it.

It wipes its face on its dirty sleeve after it’s done, but there’s still blood in the stubble on its chin when it turns around again and looks at her.

Well, at least it’s not completely messed up. Actually, she’s a little disappointed. It would have been so much simpler to call it a lost cause and put the thing out of its misery than to have to figure out why it acts the way it does. She studies it through the bars. Even a fed corpse should be drawn toward the living. They’ll kill anything with a heartbeat, but this one is just standing idly in the center of the cage.

She heaves a sigh. Well, it’s not completely tame if it still eats, so even locked in a cage, she can’t risk leaving its mouth uncovered.

She opens the door and surges in again, and in an instant has her metal hand wrapped around its neck. It wheezes a little, not needing to breathe but taking in a breath anyway, and she quickly puts the muzzle back on its head and forcefully spins it around so she can lock it. When she leaves the cage again, she almost thinks that it looks a little bewildered, but it must just be her imagination. She shakes her head, locks the cage, and turns to leave.

She comes back later in the day with a War Boy. She stays back and tells the War Boy to approach the cage by himself. He does, and she watches the corpse fling itself at the bars and groan as it reaches out to try to grab him. The War Boy stays just out of reach, taunting it a bit, and she calls him back before she approaches herself. The corpse lets its arms fall, and becomes completely subdued. She steps back and motions the War Boy forward again. The corpse seems a little more hesitant, still a bit distracted by her, but it gnashes its teeth and reaches for him again, like any hungry corpse should do.

She dismisses the War Boy. She’s seen enough.

As soon as the boy is gone, she steps forward and slams her metal hand against the cage and snaps at the corpse in front of her. “Okay, what the hell is it about me? You act perfectly normal toward everyone else…” She pauses, then breathes out a quiet laugh, “I’m talking to a corpse. Great.” She shakes her head and turns away.

“You’re… different.” The words drift to her in a quiet breath, barely even words, but just recognizable enough.

Furiosa’s eyes go wide, and she turns quickly and stares at the corpse in front of her. She’s never heard one speak, didn’t think they were even capable of speech. She’s silent for a good minute, not sure how to react to something she was so sure was just a mindless monster suddenly talking to her. “I’m different?”

The corpse looks down, seeming to consider her reply. “To me,” it answers after a time, the words obviously a struggle for it to get out.

Furiosa stares at it in silent shock a little longer, then steps back, takes a breath, and turns and walks away. She needs to regroup, to reassess. This is suddenly a completely different situation, and it needs a calm head, which she thinks she’s a bit past at this particular moment.

How the hell can it be talking? It’s obviously a corpse, there’s no doubt there. Even a feral man in particularly bad shape wouldn’t look that sorry. But this shouldn’t be happening. Corpses don’t feel, they don’t think, and they certainly don’t talk. She wonders briefly how much of the man it used to be might still be in that head. One thing is clear, at least. She can’t let anybody else find out about this. Not the Organic, not Joe, not even a single War Boy. Not until she can figure out what is going on.

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He watches the woman suddenly turn and walk away from him without another word, and he doesn’t understand. He steps back until his back hits the far side of the cage and he slowly slides down it onto the ground. He did something wrong. He had to have. But he doesn’t know what. She had asked what it was about her, and he had answered, as best he knew how. He takes a deep breath and lets it out in a slow sigh.

Was different bad? Should he have used another word? He’s not even sure how she’s different. Just that she’s the first person he hasn’t felt like being the monster he is toward in… well, ever. But maybe she’s not different. Maybe she’s just like every other person, and there’s something wrong with him.

He decides eventually that even if there is something wrong with him, he doesn’t care. Corpses eat the brains of their human prey because it makes them feel alive again, and he’s realized that being near her feels a little like that. It’s not quite the same - he doesn’t get to live the feelings and memories of someone else - he doesn’t even quite feel alive, but he does feel more human around her.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t see any reason to, but it’s only a few hours before she comes back. She steps straight up to the cage and stares in at him, both hands gripping the bars in front of her. He hauls himself to his feet with the clumsiness that comes with being a corpse, but doesn’t quite dare stepping any farther forward than the middle of the cage. He meets her eyes.

“Okay, since obviously you can…” she says, “talk.”

He’s frozen for a minute. Her tone doesn’t give him much in the way of an option. He has a feeling that if he doesn’t show now that he’s more than a mindless, reanimated body, his immediate alternatives are target practice or medical guinea pig.

He hums in the back of his throat but it comes out as a low growl, making him sound more dead than anything, and he forcibly clears his throat. What does one say? What can one say?

“You… gonna kill me?” He can barely get his voice to actually work, and it comes out as nearly whispered rasps of air. Of course his own survival is the first thing that comes to mind, but they’re words and they’re actually coming out of his mouth, so he’ll take it.

She looks at him almost suspiciously. “Not if you don’t give me reason to.”

“Won’t… hurt… you.”

“But you will hurt other people.”

He pauses, looks away. Honestly? Yeah, he probably would. Unlike her, the men she works with still register as food to him. He realizes he might want to get over that if he wants to survive now.

When he doesn’t answer, she continues. “How can you talk? Can others talk?”

He shrugs, though he knows at least some can get the occasional word out. It’s just generally not worth the effort, not when it takes so much work to get a word across, and not when anybody who would care about words won’t listen because they’re generally too busy trying to blow your dead brains out.

“You are dead,” she says next, half question, half statement.

He nods confirmation. She sighs, and looks at him like she’s not sure what to make of him.

He finally steps up to the bars, and she doesn’t flinch or step back. “What will you… do with me?” He tries to remember to blink his eyes like a living person. Maybe if he can make an effort to not completely creep her out, he can up his chances of getting out of this alive. Undead. Whatever.

Her eyes flick away from him, and he can tell she’s seriously thinking about it. “Technically you’re the Organic’s property,” she says after a minute. “He needs all the dead he can get to try to find a way to… fix things.”

He sinks a little. He may be a corpse, nothing more to them than walking, dead meat, but he doesn’t particularly like the idea of belonging to someone else, like he’s just some object.

She continues. “But I think you’re no good to him if you’re not a normal corpse.”

When he looks back up at her, their eyes meet. He’s not sure how much she really believes her own words, but he’s relieved she doesn’t seem to want to just toss him back to his previous fate.

His question still hangs in the air between them.

“I’m going to keep you here for now, keep an eye on you.” To figure out what’s wrong with you goes unsaid, though he’s pretty sure they’re both thinking it.

“And then?”

She closes her mouth. Clearly she doesn’t know what to do with him.

“Don’t speak to anyone else. I don’t know what they’d do to you.” She turns and leaves again. He leans his forehead against the bars and watches until she’s out of sight, then closes his eyes and groans to himself.

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She goes back the following day.

She’s been trying to figure out what to do with the corpse, but her options are limited. She can’t exactly trust it outside of the cage and isn’t prepared to give it back to the Organic Mechanic. To make the matter worse, her plans to break free and take Joe’s wives with her are falling into place, and she certainly can’t do anything with the corpse then. It’s looking like this particular zombie only has one good option. She puts her hand reflexively to the gun at her hip as she walks.

The corpse is standing idly in the center of its cage as she approaches, and it stares at her. It’s a little unnerving, to be honest. Most dead don’t just stare like this.

She pulls out the pistol and levels it at its head. This is for the best. She told it she wouldn’t kill it unless it gave her a reason to, but sometimes things are just out of one’s control. There’s something different about this corpse, and if she leaves it without killing it, it’ll eventually end up back in the Organic’s hands, and she fears he might learn too much from it. It’s more alive than any zombie she’s ever seen, and if it is somehow a key to figuring out the plague of undead, some step between dead and living, she can’t let the Organic or Joe find out about it. Joe must die, and what better way than the ticking time bomb he’s already got over his head?

The corpse almost looks afraid, she thinks, and it stumbles clumsily away from her, but doesn’t say anything. Its mouth, still bloodied from its meal yesterday, twists behind the muzzle into a shape she can only interpret as apprehension.

She hesitates, but steadies her grip on the gun. She’s killed plenty of innocent people, plenty of people in cold blood in the name of the Citadel. How is this any different? If anything, it’s better. This monster isn’t exactly innocent of much, and this is in the interest of stopping Joe’s reign. Better to just put it out of its misery now. But her mind comes back to the possibility of this corpse being the start of something new. She has to keep it out of Joe’s hands, but can she really just put an end to it? Can she live with being responsible for removing a possibility for the world to heal?

Her aim falters as she questions her choice further. Can she blame this thing for killing people when that’s the only way it has to survive? Can she really just put it to death knowing there’s a mind in there, a consciousness that may be no different from that of a living person? Does it really need to die?

The look of fear is what gets to her the most. This corpse does feel.

She slowly lowers the pistol, letting out a frustrated sigh as she does. The corpse’s body gradually goes from tense to loose again, and after she puts the gun back in her holster, it lets out a raspy breath that it must have been holding since she pointed the gun at it. It still looks a little afraid, though, and doesn’t approach her.

She meets its gaze as she steps up to the bars of the cage. She has to admit she is curious about it. Maybe there’s more to it that she doesn’t know. Maybe there’s more to what’s wrong with the world as a whole. “Do you know why you’re different from the others?”

It doesn’t move, doesn’t answer.

Furiosa sighs. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to kill you. I thought it would be best, but… Maybe there’s something to you.”

The corpse blinks slowly at her, and cautiously takes a step forward.

“Do you know why you’re different?” She repeats.

The corpse shakes its head.

“Have you always been able to talk?”

“Not… well.”

She wouldn’t say it speaks particularly well right now either, but maybe this is still better than usual for it. “Has anything else changed?”

It looks to the side, thinking. “Feel…” But it doesn’t seem to know how to complete what it wants to say. It stumbles around a few words, either deciding they’re not right, or jut failing to say them regardless. “Feel… new things. Stronger things,” it finally completes. “Don’t want to… kill you.”

“And you’ve never felt that before.”

“…No.”

“Can I trust you around others?”

It hesitates. “I… can try.”

“That’s not good enough.”

It looks down. Silence stretches out uncomfortably.

She sighs. “I have duties to attend to.” She doesn’t have time to be standing around chatting with a dead man right now. She came here to kill it, nothing more. The corpse gives a regretful nod, and she turns and leaves. She’ll figure this out, she just needs a bit more time.

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He thinks about what he told her. He can’t quite describe how he feels. He’s always had some semblance of emotions, but they never had much of an effect on him. He likes it when she’s around though, likes the unique feeling of not being driven by his hunger, actually finds, a bit to his surprise, that he likes interacting with a person rather than just seeing them as food.

She visits him briefly each day, and brings him food every few days, though it’s only enough to keep the edge off of his hunger, never enough to make it go away. He’s just starting to get used to the routine of it, of the long days of nothing to do but stare through the bars of his cage at the wall, of getting fed only once his hunger grows nearly to the point of uncontrollable need, until one day, she brings him food a couple days early, and not his usual rations but a chunk nearly twice the size. He looks at her questioningly as she unlocks the cage and takes off his muzzle before stepping out. What’s the occasion? But she doesn’t say, and he doesn’t ask. He simply crouches down to pick up the offered meal, turns his back to her as has become his habit, and starts eating in large, messy bites.

He reaches the point of satisfaction, and normally he would stop here, save the rest for when he gets hungry again, but he doubts he’ll be allowed to keep this (he has a feeling something big is about to happen now) and he doesn’t know when his next meal will be, so he makes himself finish the last several bites, then turns toward her.

She wets a piece of cloth with water from a canteen, then tosses it at him. “Clean up your face. There can’t be fresh blood on it.”

The cloth hits him in the middle of the chest and falls to the floor, his reaction time too slow to catch it. He leans down and picks it up, then starts scrubbing at his face with it. He glances up at her now and then, and she motions to spots he missed until she seems satisfied, and he cleans off his hands before offering the bloodied cloth back to her. She takes it back and tucks it away as she steps back into the cage, then puts the muzzle back on his face, this time with a chain attached to the back.

“You have to act like you’re not interested in eating at all. You got that?”

He nods.

She leads him out of the cage, and he’s surprised to find he’s able to stumble along at nearly the speed she walks, his legs feeling a little less sluggish and clumsy than when she had dragged him into the cage in the first place.

She takes him down to a large bay, and he looks curiously at all the cars they pass by, until she selects one and starts checking it over, tugging him along with her by his chain as she circles the vehicle. She checks the back and then looks under the hood.

“Boss?”

They both turn toward the voice, a man painted skeletal white like the others, but older than most he’s seen, with a quizzical look on his face.

“I’m taking it out to shoot it,” she says with confidence and an air of authority. “Something’s wrong with it, it won’t even eat.” She glances over at him, and he tries to keep his face dull and emotionless, though he is definitely concerned and a little confused by now.

The other man simply looks like her answer just raised further questions. He doesn’t ask, but it’s apparent on his face. She turns back to the car she was inspecting, but continues speaking to him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I want it far away from the others in case it can infect them. I’ll leave the body out in the wastes rather than risk dealing with it here.” She looks over her shoulder briefly. “Can you tie it up for me?”

He tries his best to stay still and not fight the other man as he steps up cautiously and pulls his hands behind his back after rummaging around for some rope. It’s made easier by the fact that he isn’t hungry anymore, and also the woman is nearby, watching him carefully out of the corner of her eye. Regardless, he pulls a bit at the ropes after his wrists are tied tightly behind his back.

“Toss it in back,” she says, handing the chain off to her subordinate. The man leads him to the back door of the vehicle and shoves him inside, pushing at him until he’s flat across the back seat, and then he ties his ankles and slams the door shut.

He lies in silence, wondering what’s going on, but unable to ask. He hopes she’s lying about the whole shooting him thing since she just lied about him not eating anymore, but he’s honestly not so sure with her.

He remains silent even after she tosses a rifle in through the window, gets in the car and starts to drive it out of the bay.

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It has been hard for her to admit, even to herself, but lately Furiosa has found herself starting to think of the corpse as a person. He, not it. She’s always made a separation there, a split between human and zombie. It was just easier that way, easier to take out an attacking one, easier to treat the Citadel’s captive ones as the livestock they were. They’re not alive anymore, and as far as she knew up until meeting this one, they were just dead meat that didn’t know to stop moving and eating. There wasn’t a mind, so there was no person. But with this one… she can’t convince herself of that anymore.

With time as she kept him in that cage, she gradually noticed that he started to have slightly less of a stoop to his posture, and there was less of a listless tilt to his head. He still looks very far from being alive, but eventually even the dark drips of greenish, oozing, oily blood that corpses have started to wear away from his skin where he had been injured in the past. He even got a bit better at speaking. His voice doesn’t always work well, but he seems to struggle less with getting words out now.

She doesn’t talk to the corpse as the car is brought down to the ground on the lift. She doesn’t talk to him as she drives through the Wretched, doesn’t even talk to him after they’re far out into the wastes and nobody’s around. He doesn’t say anything either, though she can nearly feel his questions burning into the back of her head.

This was a convenient situation, as it turned out. She needed an excuse to get away from the Citadel by herself to go make a deal with the Rock Riders in the pass so she can get through with the War Rig in a couple days. She hadn’t really known what to do with the corpse anyway. Leaving him for the Organic Mechanic to discover and study wasn’t acceptable. She already found that she didn’t want to just kill him, and taking him with her when she left to escape would have been too risky, or raised too many questions. Even muzzled and tied, she couldn’t quite trust him in the back with Joe’s wives, at the very least because he might give away their hiding place before she was able to leave, and throwing him in the cab of the Rig didn’t make sense. Even her War Boys might question that.

But this… this worked. It would have been easy enough if the situation she made up about the corpse were real to just order a War Boy to take him out and shoot him, but she could also claim it as her task just as easily. She was in charge of caring for the corpses anyway, so why shouldn’t she be the one to dispose of one? Ace didn’t question it after she explained it to him, and he is the most likely one to realize it when something is amiss with her.

So, she decided, she’d just let the corpse go. It wasn’t ideal to let a man-eating monster back into the world when things were already in bad shape, but there was something about him, and maybe he could be different. Either way, he won’t be her problem anymore. She doesn’t have the time to deal with this right now.

She gets most of the way to the canyon before she stops the car. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are on her as she turns around in her seat to look at him.

“I’m letting you go,” she says, speaking to him for the first time since she took him out of the cage.

The corpse grunts, almost questioningly, but doesn’t move. She gets out and opens the back door, then unties his ankles. He struggles a bit to get out of the car, but once he’s on his feet, she unties his wrists, then cautiously takes off his muzzle. There’s nothing keeping him restrained now, nothing to stop him from attacking her if he chooses, and she keeps her metal arm between him and herself, and keeps her other hand on the pistol at her hip.

“Go,” she says, when he just stands there staring dumbly at her. “Just don’t go anywhere near there again,” she motions back toward the Citadel, “or we’re both fucked.”

He blinks, looks at the arm she’s holding defensively between them, glances at the hand on her gun, and with a grunt, slowly turns and limps away from her. She waits until he’s a safe distance away before she lets down her guard, climbs back into the car, and continues on her way.

The deal with the Rock Riders goes about as well as she could have expected: a high price, but with the Citadel’s resources, she can afford it. When she drives back out of the canyon and heads toward the Citadel again, she passes the corpse, simply standing out in the wastes like he doesn’t know what to do anymore. She shakes her head and speeds past him. Not her problem anymore.

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He watches her drive away, and then just stands there for a long time, glad to be free but at the same time wishing she hadn’t just left him here. He doesn’t know how much time has passed before he finally stumbles forward and starts moving. He doesn’t know where to go, though that’s not new; he’s never traveled with much of a destination in mind, but now he feels lost. He moves aimlessly, not yet driven by hunger, not driven by much of anything. If he were smart, he would turn his back to those rock towers and get as far away as he could, but he feels drawn toward them again, toward her. He was changing, he knows he was, and he wants to find out where that change would lead him. But he remembers her warning, that him going back there wouldn’t be good for either of them. He keeps his distance from the place, but he doesn’t leave, either.

He wanders for a couple days, inching closer but being wary of hunting parties or more of those skeletal boys that captured him before. He can hide from them if he’s in the right terrain, but what he can’t hide from is the massive dust storm that creeps up from the horizon. He moves as quickly as he can away from it, searching for a place where he might be able to go underground, but it catches up to him with deceptive speed and sweeps him up into the air.

He’s tossed about, flung into the ground, picked up again and spun round and round. Lightning sparks around him and tornadoes rip their way across the sands. It’s not a very fun experience, but there’s not a lot he can do as it flings him this way and that, until it finally passes and deposits him face-down in a pile of sand.

He thinks his body might hurt. He’s not entirely sure he knows what pain feels like, but there’s a heaviness in his limbs that keeps him from moving, and he’s glad he doesn’t have to breathe, because his face is buried in sand, and for a while it just feels too hard to get up.

When he finally does manage to lift his limbs and drag himself out of the sand with newly broken bones grinding against each other, he stops to look around. It’s quiet, calm, nothing but settling dust around him.

A sound reaches his ears and he turns around to see a shape in the distance, small and black. The sound of a motor choking on dust floats toward him again. He stumbles to his feet. He doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know who is with that vehicle, and knows it may be stupid of him to go toward them, but he feels drawn in that direction. He’s a little hungry after a couple days without food, not enough to really bother him or make him think of nothing but hunting down prey like it does when the hunger truly sets in, but he figures he should take every opportunity he can get. That vehicle looks stranded, maybe damaged by the storm. Maybe the people in the vehicle are damaged too. Maybe they won’t put up much of a fight.

He’s limping more than usual as he walks, but he’s still able to walk, so he doesn’t think he has any broken bones in his legs. His arm grinds, though, and there’s a scraping in his side when he moves, but they’re not enough to stop him.

When he finally reaches the vehicle, a big black rig built for battle, he stops behind the smaller trailer on the back, steadies himself on his feet, then takes an unnecessary breath and steps around, ready to lunge at the first thing he sees.

The first thing he sees is five women in white, not at all what he had expected, and like nothing he’s seen in the wasteland before. He stumbles to a stop, surprised. They’re not armed, at least. He scans across them, and there she is. The one who makes him feel almost human. He’s stopped dead in his tracks for a moment, but he snaps out of it and limps toward her.

There’s a scream that startles him as the first of them notices him, and the five in white are suddenly all moving away from him as the short-haired woman looks up with a sharp gaze. She leaps for the door of the rig beside her, reaches inside and drops back to the ground with a gun in her hand, which she immediately points at him. He stumbles to a stop.

“Won’t… eat,” he manages to get out.

She narrows her eyes at him suspiciously. He takes a careful step forward, but stops when her aim moves from his chest to his head.

“Won’t eat,” he repeats.

“What are you doing here, fool? I told you to get away.” She’s not wearing the metal arm, and this is the first time he’s seen her without it.

He searches for an answer, particularly one that doesn’t come across as creepy, but one doesn’t come to him easily.

“Furiosa, do you know that corpse?” It’s one of the women behind her, one with long platinum hair. She’s looking at him with a keen curiosity, her fear tucked away for the moment.

Furiosa twitches her head, apparently a signal to the woman behind her, because she stops and steps back.

“What do you want?” Furiosa’s voice is sharp, still distrustful.

He’s not really sure what he wants, other than maybe to not get shot right now. “I’m… changing…”

Her aim lowers back to his chest and her expression changes, but only slightly. He slowly puts his hands up beside him. Of course he has no gun to speak of, but he wants to show her that he’s basically defenseless before her. He has no intention of attacking her.

“Can be… different,” he says quietly, but it’s all up to her at this point. He can only wait for her decision, and hope that decision isn’t to shoot him.

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He’s changing, the corpse said. Well, at least he could confirm her suspicions about him. “That’s why I let you go. Why didn’t you get away?”

“Changed… because of you.”

She shakes her head, not believing it. He had said before that she was somehow different, but that doesn’t even make sense. How could she have any effect on a dead man? He’s the one who’s different somehow. The corpse turns as he hears the sound of the Doof Warrior’s guitar calling through the distance, and Furiosa squints past him at the dark shapes looming on the horizon.

She looks over her shoulder quickly to address the women behind her. “Get in.”

They all scramble for the Rig, climbing up its side and into the door.

“Wait…”

She sees the corpse take an unsteady step toward her, and she snaps her gaze back to him and steadies her aim at his chest. He stops again. Her eyes focus past him again for a moment, back to the vehicles on the horizon, and she tries to think through the situation quickly. They have to go, and she doesn’t want to bring this corpse, but what will happen to him if she leaves him? They may well just shoot him or run him over on their way past, but what if one of the vehicles stops to grab him? She scowls at the creature in front of her. Stupid thing. Why couldn’t he have just gone away from here? He’s not leaving her much of an option now. It’s shoot him or take him with, unless she wants to risk all her effort keeping him away from the Organic to go to waste.

She looks over her shoulder as Joe’s wives pile into the back seat of the Rig and close the door behind them. Can she trust him? She’s still not sure.

“Front seat,” she says, lowering the gun but keeping the safety off. “Don’t make me regret this. I will shoot you if you make the wrong move.”

The corpse seems a little taken aback, but she motions toward the Rig, and he starts moving with a lurch. He passes her, his eyes staying on her as long as they can, and he crosses around in front of the Rig. She hears him open the passenger door as she quickly straps her arm back on and climbs in herself.

He struggles to get into the Rig, one of his arms bending at a bit of an unnatural angle when he puts weight against it. She reaches behind his seat as he finally makes it in and she grabs the gun strapped there. The women in the back look incredulous.

“Furiosa, what—“

She hands the gun to Toast. “He’s coming with us. If he tries to attack, just shoot him.”

Toast takes the gun and points it dutifully at the corpse as he settles uncomfortably into the passenger seat, looking warily over his shoulder, and Furiosa tries to ignore the confused and concerned complaints from the others. She keeps her own gun right by her side as she goes through the kill switch sequence and starts the Rig.

The corpse sits stiffly in the seat, his hands held close to himself, as if doing anything else would get him shot. To be fair, he might not be far off. Toast looks a bit on edge having a zombie in the truck with them, and Furiosa doesn’t know how quickly the other woman might react to any movement on the corpse’s part. She keeps her own eye on him as she drives, hoping she hasn’t just made a very bad decision.

They make it only half way to the canyon before something goes wrong. A deep rumbling shakes the Rig, and she can feel the great beast groan and struggle to pull against the extra drag. It takes her a moment to put it all together. Something’s gone wrong, something’s dragging that shouldn’t be. Frustrated, she growls and pounds the steering wheel. “We’re dragging something out back. I think it’s the fuel pod.” She pulls a strap from the dashboard and wraps it around the steering wheel to keep it steady. There’s enough open road between them and the canyon that she should be able to see if she can fix the problem and be back before they risk running into anything.

She looks over at the corpse who looks no less bewildered and concerned than he had earlier, then back over her shoulder at Toast. She’s still got the gun trained on him, and Furiosa decides she has it under control. She’d rather not leave the corpse alone with them, but doesn’t have much of another option. She locks the throttle, swings the door open and climbs out quickly.

She’s not typically back here on the Rig, and it’s been a long time since she was back here while it was driving, but she knows this truck well. It’s a quick climb for her to get back to the fuel pod and examine the problem. The brake line has come unplugged, causing the wheels of the pod to lock up and drag. She quickly grabs it and plugs it back in, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. These things don’t just come out on their own. Could it be sabotage? She was sure all her War Boys had been torn from the Rig in the storm. She even checked. Could someone have gotten onto the Rig without her knowing it? She hurries back toward the cab.

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He’s not entirely sure if he can actually drive, but figures it can’t be that hard in a truck that’s already moving, and it occurs to him that it feels odd to be sitting in the passenger seat of a truck moving at full speed without a driver. He glances over his shoulder at the woman holding a gun on him, and motions to the driver’s seat before he carefully moves over toward it. She follows him with the gun, looking at him distrustfully, but doesn’t shoot him.

He unstraps the steering wheel as he sits down in the driver’s seat and adjusts the truck’s course a bit, steering toward the canyon Furiosa had been heading for.

“Filth! You traitored him!”

There’s suddenly a chain around his neck, pulling hard and yanking him back in his seat. He wheezes a bit, but his arms are long enough to still reach the wheel, so he keeps driving, though he tries to look over his shoulder and see who is suddenly attempting to strangle him.

“What…?” The person behind him sounds completely confused. The chain loosens a bit, then tightens briefly before the man behind him lets go of one end of it with a startled sound and it slips from around his neck. He glances over his shoulder to see four of the women pulling one of the skeletal ones back away from him, the platinum-haired one with her teeth practically imbedded in the boy’s arm. It’s not something he expected, but being what he is, he can’t exactly argue with her technique.

Furiosa is suddenly beside him outside the truck. She gives him an unsure look as she swings the door open, and he quickly relinquishes the seat to her. She glances at the commotion in the back seat as she settles down, and her hand goes to the gearshift as if it might somehow help her with the situation, but she evidently decides the other women have it under control, and she turns her eyes back to the road.

“We’ve got Gastown and the Bullet Farm on our tail,” she comments, and he’s not quite sure who she’s talking to, him or the women in back. They all seem rather distracted with the boy they’re busy yelling at.

“It’s over, you can’t defy him.” The boy lunges forward as he yells at her, and she turns and spits in his face before turning back to the road and ignoring the retort of spit that comes from him.

He’s more than a little on edge as he watches the women dangle the boy out of the door before pushing him out of the rig altogether, and he thinks they could easily do the same to him. He wouldn’t bite them even if they tried. She would never let him live if he did.

Furiosa glances at him as the women settle back into their seats and an uneasy quiet lowers over the cab again. She opens her mouth to say something, closes it again, reconsiders, and tries again. “Do you have a name? Something I can call you?”

He stares at her for a moment, blankly, then shakes his head. “Does it… matter?” Nevermind that he doesn’t even remember what his name was, he’d been reduced to property, and he’s honestly not even sure why she agreed to bring him along in the first place. Why does he matter?

Something twitches in his chest, a strange feeling that he can’t quite identify. Ba-dum, a single beat.

“What do I call you?” she insists.

“Don’t… remember it,” he admits.

She sighs. “Fine. But I’m going to need you here. You may have to drive the Rig. I made a deal up ahead, safe passage, but I’m not sure if it’s still any good.”

He glances toward the canyon. He had seen her go there after she dropped him off in the wastes a couple days ago.

She turns to the women in back. “Get back in the hold, keep the hatch open.”

He watches them climb one-by one into the hole in the floor, the one with the gun going last, keeping it trained on him until she’s out of sight. Furiosa turns back to him. “Stay out of sight. I’m supposed to be alone. But when I yell Fool, you drive out of here as fast as you can.”

He stares for a moment, but she gives him an expectant look, so he nods and follows the others into the hatch in the floor.

“This is the kill switch sequence,” she continues as they enter the canyon. “One, one, two, one, red, black, go. You got it?”

He gives her a nod as she glances over her shoulder at him. She turns forward again, and reaches toward the steering column. She gathers some grease on her fingers, and smears it across her forehead, painting it black until she looks like how he’s used to seeing her. A small shiver creeps down his spine as he spots her gaze on him in the rearview mirror.

When she gets into the canyon, she stops the truck altogether. She looks apprehensive before she opens the door and climbs out. Outside, he can hear her yelling to someone, telling them she has what they asked for, and then he hears the sound of a motorbike engine. He can’t hear what the other people are saying, if anything, but she responds, and then everything goes quiet. He has no idea what’s going on, but he has a bad feeling.

He waits.

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This is not going well. The Rock Riders are upset and the war parties are getting uncomfortably close. They’re not dropping the rocks, and as she sees the first of the war party cars turn the corner and come into view, she knows there’s no hope for this deal. The Rock Riders are simply going to let them get her.

“FOOL!”

She dives over the fuel pod’s hitch as bullets fly her way, and for a terrifying several seconds, all is quiet in the Rig. She shouldn’t have trusted him with this task. She should have left Toast to do it. She runs toward the front of the Rig, leaps onto the sideboards of the passenger side of the cab as she hears a bike speeding down the slope toward them, and she flings open the passenger door. He’s in the seat, at least, and is just finishing the sequence. He punches the final button as she climbs in, and the truck roars to life.

Not useless. Just slow. She still probably should have asked Toast.

“Move.” She practically pulls him out of the seat and takes his place. She’s not quite sure what she was thinking, asking a corpse to drive. She just assumed that he could, since he was in the driver’s seat earlier. Something made her feel like she could trust him. Regardless, he’s slow, and now they need speed. She throws the Rig into gear, lets up on the clutch, pressing the gas as much as her Rig will take, and holds her breath as the truck lurches into motion.

A Rock Rider comes down a steep slope right in front of the Rig, skidding to a stop in front of her, and she quickly grabs a gun on the ceiling above her, leans out the window, and takes him out before he has a chance to get his hand on a gun. She doesn’t bother to swerve around him or his bike as she urges the War Rig forward.

As the Rig picks up speed, she hears an explosion behind them. She glances in the mirror as rocks tumble from above the pass and block the narrow path, and she lets out a breath. But the Rock Riders are still shooting at them, and there’s no time to stop and make amends now. The deal is off, and she needs to move. Beside her, the corpse is looking confused and a bit grim. She tenses as he finds a gun and reaches for it, but he immediately directs his attention outside as the Rig continues gaining speed.

The Rock Riders close in from both sides and are on them before long. They don’t pull their punches, and almost immediately have the front of her Rig on fire, but there’s no stopping now. She takes them out one by one with carefully aimed shots while still keeping an eye on the road through the flames as best she can. The corpse seems surprisingly unfazed by the fact that the truck is on fire, and he shoots out his window alongside her. She’s not sure he’s doing anything more than wasting bullets until she catches sight of one of the Rock Riders drop on his side of the truck, and she decides that even if he is mostly wasting bullets, she’d rather have him here than not.

When the explosives finally stop falling on them, she takes a moment to smother the flames in sand from the plow, and tosses her nearly-empty gun to the women who have reemerged in the back, with a barked order to reload it. As the dust clears from around them, though, she realizes the Rock Riders still have enough natural stone ramps to send them flying above the Rig.

“Sunroof,” she says to the corpse as she reaches across the cab to grab her SKS.

He looks up, looks over at her, looks up, then stands up and opens the sunroof before climbing unsteadily onto the seat. Furiosa quickly loads the clip and passes the gun up to him. It’s a few moments before she hears the first shot from him, and she hopes he can manage enough aim to stop them from getting onto the Rig. In the mean time, she focuses her attention back on taking out as many as she can herself, shooting a couple of them out her window before reaching across the cab to take out a few on the other side as well. Shot after shot fires above her, and she catches sight of at least one bike tumble riderless to the side of the Rig.

“We had a deal!” Gunshots fire from behind, and the corpse suddenly falls back into the cab with a barely-human growl, dropping the SKS between them in the process. She turns quickly in her seat and spots the Rock Rider on the top of the tanker through the back window.

“Move,” she orders to the women in back only seconds before firing through the window, taking the leader down. She glances at the corpse, but he’s looking out the window beside him and fumbling blindly for a gun. She follows his gaze in time to see one last Rock Rider approach their flank with some sort of explosive trailing smoke behind his bike. She fires two shots out the rear window and sees him go down, but his momentum carries him under the truck, and she glances nervously in her mirror as the explosion goes off and the Rig jolts. The fuel pod rolls away behind them. It explodes violently after it veers off-course and runs into a rock wall, but the rest of the truck moves on without anything amiss, so she turns her attention back toward the road.

The corpse settles slowly back into his seat, but as she glances at him, she notices he’s he’s looking down at himself, inspecting his shoulder with a down-turned mouth.

“You shot?” She glances back at the road and then at him once more before turning her eyes back to the road and doing a quick scan for any more Rock Riders.

He grunts. “Doesn’t matter.”

She’d press further, but through the dust behind them, she catches sight of a vehicle not far behind, and she grimaces. It’s the vehicle Joe gave to Rictus, the only truck suited to climb over a pile of boulders blocking its way. And behind the wheel, she’d bet, is Joe himself.

“Can you drive?” She asks the corpse, not a request but a genuine question. It should be safe enough if he knows what he’s doing, and this is something she needs to deal with without distractions.

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The canyon is starting to widen, the path less curved and with fewer obstacles, and he’s pretty sure he can handle driving the truck. He nods at her, and she locks the throttle before they quickly switch places. He focuses his attention on the road ahead of them, steering carefully. The truck following them is close on their flank, and then suddenly it rushes forward and launches itself off a stone ramp, pulling in front of them. He grimaces, pretty sure he’s not prepared for vehicular battle, and continues steering the massive truck as best he can. They fall back along his side of the truck, and a man perched on the side points a crossbow at them. He shoots quickly out the window at the man, but is pretty sure none of his shots hit their mark. Luckily Furiosa leans across and shoots as well, and the man falls with a yell.

The next attack comes in the form of a harpoon through the window, and he stares down at it right between his hands in the middle of the steering wheel. He’s not quite sure what to do, but suddenly it breaks loose from the dashboard, tears the wheel off with it, and pins his hand between the wheel and the window frame of the truck. He grunts and tugs at his arm, trying to free it, but it’s pretty well stuck, and he’s glad again that he doesn’t feel pain because he bets he’d be feeling pretty awful right now, between the hand and the bullet wounds.

One of the women in back climbs out of the truck and with the help of another cuts the chain of the harpoon, and his hand is suddenly freed. He stares down at the empty post where the steering wheel had been. How is he supposed to steer now? Furiosa quickly tightens a wrench down onto it, moments before he hears a yell of “look out!” His eyes dart up to see a rock right in their path, and both he and Furiosa push on the wrench, trying to turn the vehicle.

He didn’t think he still had much in the way of reflexes, but he cringes as the truck smashes into the rock, and he instantly realizes that one of the women had been on the outside of the truck. He jams his head out the window, craning his neck around to see if she made it. If he got her killed… He’s briefly taken aback by the realization that for the first time in his unlife, he’d actually feel bad about causing someone’s death.

She peeks around the back of the rig, and he’s relieved. He gives her triumphant expression a broken little thumbs up, and turns his attention back to trying to steer the truck, to the limited extent that he can with only a large wrench to do it with.

It’s not until he hears a scream of terror that he turns around again, only to see the same woman fall along with the door she was clinging to, right in the path of their pursuers. He stares in shock, feeling a jab in his chest as he watches the other truck roll over her. The truck swerves to try to avoid her at the last second and rolls, and he turns forward, his mouth partially agape.

“Stop! Turn the Rig around. Go back for her!”

He glances over his shoulder as the red-haired woman yanks at his shirt sleeve. He’s not the one in control here. Hell, he doesn’t even know what’s going on. He looks over to Furiosa, his foot faltering on the gas pedal. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her brow creased. She looks at the desperate and distraught faces of the women in back, then back at him. “Did you see it?”

He hesitates. He thinks he saw her go under the wheels, but it all happened so fast, he’s not entirely sure. Guilt jags in his chest, and that feels stranger than anything. So many lives have been lost at his hands, and he never particularly enjoyed it, but guilt had always been pretty far from his mind. Maybe it’s that this death feels more senseless than the rest. But is a death like this really any more senseless than a death for the sole purpose of sustaining an undead monster? Shouldn’t he feel guilty for all those other deaths as well? He gives his head a quick, jerky shake to jog the thoughts out of it. Now is not the time for an existential crisis.

Furiosa seems to take that as an answer. “Stop the Rig.”

He doesn’t know about this, but he follows her order, and brings the massive truck rolling to a jerky stop. Maybe this isn’t a good idea, but he’s finding that he really doesn’t like feeling guilty, and he’d feel a lot better not leaving that woman to die like that… If she’s even still alive now.

Furiosa picks up the rifle he had dropped when he had gotten shot earlier, and checks its clip. “Leave any bullets in here?” She apparently finds that no, he did not, and she quickly reloads the weapon and attaches the scope. Next she looks to the women in back. “Stay here,” she says firmly. She gives him a look that he can’t quite read, then turns and exits the truck. He sits frozen for a moment, then lurches forward and follows her out of the truck. She didn’t tell him to stay.

Chapter Text

There’s rapid gunfire as she nears the back of the tanker, and Furiosa pins herself against the rearmost wheel and looks carefully around the edge of it. The corpse approaches behind her and peeks past her. Rictus marches toward the Rig, firing a hulking gun in sweeping motions toward them. Furiosa ducks back quickly, takes a breath, then aims the SKS carefully past the tire. She fires a single shot, and watches Rictus go down hard.

She waits a moment. Joe should still be back there, if he survived the wreck. After a minute without any sign of him, she finally pushes herself up and hurries closer.

The corpse stumbles after her and grunts quietly. “I’ll distract.”

“Fool,” she hisses, but he’s already loping awkwardly ahead of her and she shakes her head and hefts the SKS up to aim past him. The upturned Bigfoot appears through the settling dust, and she slows her pace, her eyes darting around for any sign of Joe. The corpse trots ahead, swinging wide around the truck, and she swings his direction to try to see.

There’s a gunshot and the corpse stops, and finally Furiosa sees Joe just beyond the truck. Another gunshot and the corpse jerks with a grunt. She takes quick aim, fires, and watches Joe drop into a heap on the ground.

She stares for a moment. How long had she dreamed of doing that?

The sound of an approaching motorbike tears her attention away, and she aims quickly past the corpse and fires again, taking out both the men on the bike at the same time. She then makes a quick assessment of the situation. Rictus is dead. Joe is down. She doesn’t know if any more pursuers are coming their way, but just beyond Joe she sees Angharad’s crumpled form. The corpse is already hurrying in that direction.

She stops by Joe’s body briefly on her way past. Headshot. She spits on him.

The corpse is carefully trying to pick Angharad up, and Furiosa hurries forward to see if she’s still alive. Her breathing is raspy and she’s unresponsive, but still alive at least.

“Come on, we have to hurry,” Furiosa says as the corpse straightens up with her in his arms. His greenish-brown blood oozes from a wound on his stomach and smears onto the white cloth of her dress.

They hurry back and manage to lift Angharad into the back and lay her across the back seat, and then Furiosa jumps in the driver’s seat, goes through the kill switch sequence, and starts the Rig. She doesn’t want to wait for anybody else to show up.

The women in back talk with varying degrees of fear and tears.

“Angharad, wake up. Please!” Capable cries.

“She’s dying,” Cheedo says quietly.

“She can’t!”

Furiosa tries to tune them out. There’s nothing she can do. The best she can do is get them away from those armies and to the Green Place as fast as possible. There will be help there.

She drives.

It’s not until Toast speaks up that her attention jolts back to the situation in the back seat.

“Corpse. What will happen if you bite her?”

“What?” Dag snaps. “You can’t do that!”

Furiosa glances over at the corpse, and he looks entirely bewildered by the idea.

“She’s dying!” Toast snaps back. “She’s not coming back from this. Either we lose her now, or we give her a chance. Maybe we’ll still lose her. Maybe she’ll become a mindless corpse. But maybe she’ll be like him.” Toast’s hand waves in his direction.

The corpse looks to Furiosa for help, and she gives him a grim look. This isn’t her decision to make. The women in back continue to argue hotly.

“I can’t watch her turn into one of them!”

“Then she’s gone forever.”

There’s a brief silence.

“Corpse, what would happen?”

The corpse shakes his head. “She’d… be dead… like me. But… don’t know if she’d be different.”

“No,” says Dag.

“It’s her only chance,” Toast argues.

Another silence.

“Do it,” Capable says firmly.

Furiosa glances at the corpse once more. He hasn’t moved.

“Do it!” Both Toast and Capable yell at him in unison, and he jumps, but slowly stands up and moves into the back.

Furiosa watches in the mirror with a suppressed grimace as he kneels on the floor and gingerly takes her arm in his hands. He glances up at the other women, still unsure, but their expressions are hardened.

“Please,” Capable says. “We can’t lose her.”

He turns toward her, then leans slowly forward and sinks his teeth into her forearm, then he lets go and quickly wipes the blood from his mouth. There’s a breathless silence throughout the Rig.

Furiosa continues to watch in the rearview mirror between glances at the road.

“Move,” the corpse grunts, pushing the other women away from Angharad’s head, and he leans forward, gripping her upper arms and pinning her to the seat as she starts to move, her eyes opening suddenly.

Cheedo ends up in the front seat, Dag beside her, with Capable and Toast pressed to the far side of the back of the Rig.

Angharad groans. Then she growls, an inhuman sound, and Cheedo hides her face. The corpse leans forward, pressing more of his weight down as she starts to struggle.

“Shh, shh,” he says. “’S okay.”

She stares up at him for a moment, then growls again and thrashes against his grip.

“No, no,” he says quietly, still trying to soothe her as he almost loses his grasp on her. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. I’m sorry.”

She continues to struggle for another few minutes, then finally seems to give up and lays still. Gradually he loosens his grip on her arms, then lets go entirely. Capable rushes forward but he puts out an arm to block her.

“Might still bite,” he warns.

Furiosa keeps a wary eye on the situation in back, prepared to react quickly if Angharad turns out to be a danger to her or the others.

Angharad slowly sits up and looks wide-eyed around the cab. She looks at the corpse, then at the living, and back at the corpse.

“Angharad?” Capable tries carefully.

Angharad’s eyes dart over to her, but there’s no recognition on her face.

Capable covers her face and lets out a muffled sob. “She’s gone.”

The corpse shakes his head. “Probably doesn’t remember… but still there.” Gradually he backs off from her, holding his hands out toward her carefully. “It’s okay,” he tells her again.

Chapter Text

Eventually everyone settles back down, but he keeps himself seated between Angharad and the others. She’s calmer around the living than he’s ever seen another corpse, but he’s still not sure he trusts her not to bite one of them if given the chance. It’s not until she speaks that he relaxes.

“…What…?”

He turns toward her. “Dead.”

Her eyes dart to him, but she doesn’t say anything.

He grunts quietly. “Do you… remember anything?”

She doesn’t respond at first, then shakes her head.

He motions toward the others in the truck. “Can’t bite them. Understand?”

She stares at him again.

“They’re not food. We… We don’t eat them.”

Slowly, she nods. “Friends?”

“Friends,” he confirms.

The red haired one stands suddenly and moves around in front of Angharad. He watches carefully, prepared to grab her if she tries to bite the woman.

“Your name’s Angharad,” the living woman says, placing a hand on her knee. “You were… are our friend.”

Angharad nods slowly, and the red haired one tries for a little smile, though she still looks like she’s on the verge of tears.

He decides that if she were going to bite any of them, she would have tried by now, so he leaves the others to talk to her quietly and he goes back to the front seat of the Rig. He listens to their quiet conversation as they try to remind their newly-dead friend what she was like in life.

Honestly, he’s a little envious. Unlike him, unlike pretty much any corpse in history, she has the chance to pick up her old life again. She has friends still nearby, and not trying to shoot her in self-defense. He sort of wishes there were someone still in the world who knew him in life, who could tell him who he was, what he was like.

It’s as the sun’s setting that the shortest one speaks up in a tone different from what they have been using to address their friend. “We should have someone in back. To look out.”

“I’ll go,” the red haired one volunteers.

“No,” says Furiosa. “I want you to stay together.”

“I can do it.” She climbs past her now undead friend and out of the missing door.

Furiosa sighs. “Can you drive? I’m going to go down and do some repairs.”

He nods and takes her place behind the wheel.

He expects as night falls and she comes back that she’ll sleep. He can continue driving as long as they need. The dead do not sleep. But she doesn’t try to sleep either. The redhead eventually comes back too, reporting that there’s no sign of anybody following them.

When they enter a wet, swampy area, a bad feeling churns in his gut. He presses a little harder on the gas pedal. Probably best if they get through this as soon as possible. The bog, however, has other plans for them, and eventually the Rig starts to swerve back and forth, the wheels sinking into the soft sand. He lets up on the gas, not sure how to handle this situation, and the truck slides to a stop, its wheels spinning uselessly in the wet sand below them. He tries to get it started again, but only stalls the truck.

“Here,” Furiosa says, and they swap places. She tries a few times and eventually gets it going again, and they stop on a small, dry hill a short distance away and take some weight off the truck before piling back in and continuing on their way. It’s not too long before the truck comes to another stop, its wheels turning but getting them nowhere. After several tries with no results other than sand flung out behind the tires, she stops with a sigh and opens her door. “Let’s use the engine plates.”

It’s as they’re trying to jam the massive plates of metal under the wheels that are the most stuck that an inhuman screech sounds through the distance, and he shoots upright, and notices Furiosa doing the same.

“Boneys,” she says breathlessly.

He feels a shudder go up his spine. Boneys creep even him out. They’re what happens to corpses that survive long enough, that lose enough humanity to just be completely gone. Barely more than dry skin stretched over a skeleton, they’re fast, ruthless, and deadly. Rarely does a corpse last long enough out here to turn into one, but as he hears another shriek from the other direction, he realizes that they might not be as rare as he had thought.

“Everyone back in the Rig!” Furiosa commands. “Keep a gun on every opening.” She hurries to the drivers seat and tries to urge the machine out of the mud.

He stays outside. He’s not a good shot, and figures if it comes to it, he can fight them better by hand than by wasting bullets.

He hears Furiosa swear quietly as the outline of the first boney appears through the mists in the distance, and she gives the truck another spin of the wheels before she stops, grabs a gun, and climbs onto her seat and up into the sunroof, doing a quick scan of their surroundings.

“Need to get out,” he tells her urgently.

She shakes her head. “This Rig isn’t going anywhere, and we’re not outrunning them.” It’s fight them off here, or die. She snaps down through the sunroof at the women in the truck. “Eyes on! Head shots are the only thing that count with these guys. If you don’t take out the brain, they just keep coming.”

Chapter Text

She shoots, takes one out, hears another roar to her right, and turns and takes that one down. The next is moving fast and takes three shots before she hits her mark and brings it down. She hears someone inside fire a few times, but they’re closing in from all sides. She grimaces. The corpse is right, being on the move would be the safest for all of them, but he can’t hold them all at bay on his own, and she can’t get the truck out of the mud and focus on fighting off a horde of boneys at the same time.

She hears a growl from the ground behind her and turns to see the corpse wrestling with one. He swings it over toward the tanker and smashes its head into the side repeatedly until it falls still. Another approaches and he runs up, grabbing it and wrestling with it too. He seems to be having a difficult time with this one, and Furiosa aims carefully and shoots it in the head, then turns to the next approaching the front of the Rig and fires again.

She hears footsteps running down the back of the tanker and turns quickly. They’re on the Rig. She stops herself short, just a hair away from firing her gun. It’s not a boney at all, but a War Boy, running full tilt toward her.

“More boneys!” He yells. “Approaching from the back! You’ll never fight them all off! We have to go!” He scrambles down the front of the tanker onto the ground and keeps running. Furiosa’s gut reaction is to shoot him anyway, but he’s not exactly a priority right now. She turns quickly as she sees movement and takes another approaching boney out with a couple shots.

“He wants to help!” Capable yells from inside.

“Gonna use the winch! Around that thing!” The War Boy runs around the front, grabs the winch cable, and hurries toward a tree just in front of the Rig. Three boneys run at him. Furiosa shoots one, and the corpse runs after the War Boy, tackling another boney and driving his fists into its face until it crumples under them. Furiosa aims at the third, but her gun clicks uselessly. She curses, drops it in the Rig, and grabs another from the ceiling beside her. She quickly drops the third mere feet away from the War Boy as he hooks the cable around the trunk and starts running back toward the Rig.

“I can do this, I know this machine!” He says breathlessly as he starts to climb up the side of the Rig.

“He does, he’s a rev head.”

Furiosa would ask how Capable knows so much about this War Boy, but now is hardly the time. She steps quickly over to the passenger seat, and takes out another boney, but another makes it to the side of the Rig. Someone inside screams as it scrambles up the side with a roar, and four shots are fired before it falls motionless to the ground.

The War Boy is in the driver’s seat now, spinning the wheels, trying to get the Rig out of the mud. The corpse is fighting off two of them by the tree. He smashes one’s head into the trunk and turns on the next, but the other flattens him and pins him, snapping its teeth in his face. She aims carefully and shoots it, then takes out two more that almost make it to the tanker.

With adrenaline running through her veins, it’s hard to tell how much time passes as she shoots one, then another, then another. The tree is slowly being pulled down, and the Rig jerks as it tries to pull itself free. She hears multiple shrieks from behind the tanker, and just through the mist can see more than she can count moving quickly toward them.

Finally the truck lurches into motion and pulls forward. Furiosa drops her second gun, ducks into the Rig and grabs a third, then resumes trying to hold the boneys at bay. She catches a glimpse of the corpse tossing the winch cable in front of the truck before he runs and scrambles up onto the sideboards. They pick up speed, and start to leave the boneys behind. Furiosa turns forward and picks off ones in front of them as the War Boy drives the Rig onto higher ground and smashes his foot onto the accelerator.

The engines are hot, but they don’t dare stop until they have left the swamp behind and the sun has started to rise. Still, Furiosa and the corpse keep a careful eye out around them as they wait for the engines to cool.

Chapter Text

He finds himself standing amongst green.

He doesn’t know if he’s ever seen so many plants. He moves through them slowly, trailing his hands along soft leaves, letting them run between his fingers.

There’s a groan behind him, and he turns to see a corpse shambling toward him. He doesn’t know why, but he’s afraid, and he feels something in his chest start to move like a beating drum. His heart. His heart is beating.

“You… did this… to me,” the corpse groans out, still moving toward him. He takes a step back.

There’s another sound behind him, then one beside him, then more and more. All around him corpses are appearing, moving toward him with dead eyes, but expressions of hatred. They’re all the faces of those he’s killed, all those he’s eaten. Almost none of them had come back as corpses, he’s sure of that, but here they are. It can’t be real. But still, he’s afraid.

“You killed us.”

“Monster.”

“Murderer.”

He backs away from one, then turns and backs away from another, then another, but he has nowhere to actually go. They surround him. He catches the face of Angharad among them, hatred on her face as well. He shakes his head. “No…”

They close in, hands grasping at him, nails digging into his skin, and it hurts—

He awakes with a start, arms swinging against the threat all around him, but suddenly it’s gone. He feels a couple fast beats in his chest, and then it goes still again.

Furiosa looks over at him. “It’s okay,” she says, but she sounds a little confused. “I… didn’t know corpses slept.”

He looks at her, even more bewildered than she. “We… don’t.”

He sits uncomfortably, but she looks at him with something almost akin to warmth. “You’re different alright.”

“Mm.” He supposes it’s good, but it’s still unsettling.

—

They’ve swapped and he’s driving the Rig again when Furiosa sees something familiar and directs him toward it. It’s not green, but there are people, and as Furiosa steps out of the Rig, it seems they are people she knows. The bikes surround her, and after a minute the other women start to get out of the Rig. He starts to climb down as well.

“The men, who are they?” One of the older women says, starting to point her gun at him and the War Boy. Her eyes grow suddenly wider. “Corpse!” She lifts her gun and aims.

Furiosa hurriedly pushes the barrel back down. “They’re not like that. There’s something about them. They’re different, they won’t attack.” She turns to look at him as he settles back in the driver’s seat, figuring it’s probably safest in there. She says something else, but he can’t hear it from inside the cab. There are skeptical looks all around her, but she nods reassuringly.

The old women greet the others, but keep their distance from Angharad, who had eventually followed the others out. They talk some more, but it’s not until Furiosa stumbles away, her face in a state of shock, that he realizes something has gone wrong. She drops to her knees atop a dune and screams, and something in his chest aches.

Only the people who had been in the War Rig with him go anywhere near him that night. The older women stay well away. He ends up sitting far from the others with Angharad seated silently beside him, staring out at the plains in front of them, until Furiosa comes to talk to him. He joins her in front of the War Rig, but Angharad doesn’t move.

“There’s no Green Place,” she says quietly with a shake of her head. “Nothing to go to, except maybe out there.” She’s wrapped in a blanket, but she motions with a jerk of her head out to the plains. “Joe is dead, but I don’t know if his armies will still try to track us down. They’re probably in mourning, so they should have lost our trail by now.” She looks back at him, then looks down. “We’ve talked about it… There’s nowhere else to go. The girls want to go back.”

“Back?” Truth be told, the thought had crossed his mind, but it seemed dangerous, and he had doubted that any of them would want such a thing. The living are so easy to kill… If the armies are still there, what chance would they have?

Furiosa looks uncomfortable. She clearly doesn’t like the idea. “We should just move on, try to find a better place somewhere… But…” she looks up at him. “It would mean leaving you and Angharad behind. You’re different from the other dead, but you’re going to need to eat sometime, aren’t you?”

He looks down. “I… don’t know.”

“The Mothers won’t take the risk. But the girls refuse to leave her behind.” She glances over her shoulder at where Angharad still sits motionlessly. “Either way is a risk,” she says, “but at least going back to the Citadel, if we can get past the war parties, we know there’s a place there, and it’ll be easy to take. We don’t know if we’ll ever find anything out here.” She seems to be trying to convince herself as much as tell him what the plan is. “I suspect the war parties would have cleared the rocks to get through, and wouldn’t have gone far after they found Joe, but leaving the canyon is the best tactical move to keep an eye out for us. If we can blow through the center of them, we can drop the tanker and block off the pass. We should be able to get to the Citadel before any of them can.”

He hums (and is quietly pleased that it didn’t come out as an inhuman growl this time). “And going back means… not leaving us behind?”

“You’re more than welcome to come with us,” she answers. “Back at the Citadel we have animal meat you can eat if you still need to. Maybe… we can see where these changes lead you.”

He nods, gives a small grunt. “I’d like that.”

Chapter Text

By morning, the Mothers finally seem convinced that the corpse and Angharad aren’t going to attack them, though they’re still a little wary of them. Furiosa can’t blame them. Corpses have never been anything other than a threat since the world fell, and it’s hard to so suddenly accept that that might not always be the case. But Keep climbs into the Rig just behind the corpse and not far from Angharad, and the others don’t fight with Furiosa over them coming.

She avoids the swamp this time. It hurts her to know that it was once her beloved home, the very place she had dreamed for so long of returning to, and she has no desire to risk running into the boneys they discovered there.

As they approach the canyon she keeps an eye out around them for the shine of sunlight on metal or glass, trying to spot where Joe’s armies might be hiding. It’s possible they’ve gone back already, but she doubts they would have pulled themselves together and organized well enough to do that after Joe’s death.

It’s not until they’re nearly to the mouth of the canyon that she starts seeing cars, and she hopes there will be a route through. They’re collected around and in the mouth of the canyon, the cars crowded around and War Boys milling about. She squints as the Rig powers forward. None of them are making any moves toward their cars. They have to have seen the Rig by now, why aren’t they moving?

As they get yet closer, she realizes how slow they’re all moving, how they’re milling about without direction or any apparent purpose. Her foot falters on the gas pedal.

They’re corpses. They’re all corpses.

And among them, she can see, their dark, dried-out bodies contrasting with the white-painted skin of the War Boys, are boneys.

She stares in shock. How did all three armies manage to get themselves killed? There’s not much time to think about it, they’re approaching the blockade of vehicles quickly, and she scans across the line, trying to find the easiest place to punch through. The corpses should be no threat as long as she doesn’t stop, but the boneys might still be able to get on the Rig, and she hopes she’s able to get through the wall of cars without slowing down too much.

She spots a thin area in the collection of vehicles, blocked only by a single car, and she swerves toward it. Corpses and boneys alike are finally starting to notice the incoming Rig, and she pushes the truck to go faster as the boneys identify and run toward her destination.

The plow of the Rig shoves aside corpses and a couple boneys and slams into the single car blocking her path and sends the smaller vehicle flying. She glances instantly in her mirrors, and sees three boneys clinging to the sides of the rig and climbing upward. There’s nothing she can do about them, she’ll have to trust the Mothers to take care of them. She’s relieved to see Maadi and Valkyrie on the bike behind her swerve deftly through the horde of dead and rain of wreckage, and come through in her wake.

It’s as she turns her eyes forward again that she nearly stomps on the brake in shock. Not far into the canyon, Joe stands right in her path, staring her down with dead eyes. His skin where visible is darkening, already drying. He’s half way to being a boney already.

With a snarl she presses her foot on the gas and keeps her course true. She doesn’t know how he came back like this, but she’s not going to let that stop her. He doesn’t even try to get out of the way, and she slams into him and sends him flying like the car she had plowed into before.

It’s amazingly satisfying, she has to admit.

Beside her the corpse jumps, and she glances in his direction. A dark bony hand grips the bottom of the window frame, then another, and then a boney lifts itself into view. Keep leans out her window and fires as it reaches into the window toward the corpse, and the boney drops suddenly out of sight. It’s as she’s reloading that another clambers past her window toward the front. It doesn’t pay any attention to Keep or any of the other living women it must have passed to get where it is, and once it reaches the front seat, its hand shoots into the window and grabs the corpse.

The corpse reacts with surprising speed, both hands suddenly gripped around the sides of the boney’s head as it tries to climb in. He gives it a shove, then another, but the boney struggles back, pushing its way farther into the window.

“Move,” Furiosa orders, aiming a gun across the cab, but the corpse doesn’t. Behind him Keep is trying to aim her rifle at the monster as well, but doesn’t fire. The corpse is in the way.

He gives the boney’s head a hard twist, and there’s a sickening crack, but it doesn’t stop the thing. He pushes against it harder, and it loses its grip and slips backward, its skeletal hand still gripping the corpse’s jacket as it does. The corpse is pulled suddenly with it, his body quickly slipping out the window as the boney falls.

Furiosa reaches across the cab quickly and grips his leg as he’s pulled out the window. She can feel him continue to struggle with the boney, and her grip starts to slip. Keep aims out the window and fires, and the corpse jerks, then goes suddenly still. Furiosa’s heart jumps into her throat, but a second later his hand grips the window frame and she feels him try to pull himself up. With a hard groan she yanks on his leg, nearly loses him, but grips a fistful of his pant leg and yanks again. Finally he makes it back in the window and flops into the seat, looking wide-eyed, but otherwise okay.

Chapter Text

He had never had a reason to fear boneys. Sure, they were creepy, but like him, they only ate the living, and he is fairly certain that he still isn’t alive. In the bog they had fought him because he had attacked them first, or so he had thought. But after that second boney came after him in the cab, leaving living people alone in order to get to him, he couldn’t help but stop and think about it.

It seems fairly clear that they were specifically after him. Was it because he was becoming different? Could they sense that? Was he somehow a threat to them? He couldn’t have been more of a threat than the living people with guns…

He glances over his shoulder at Angharad in the back seat. She’s different too, and he doesn’t doubt that it’s because he’s the one who turned her. Maybe he is somehow a threat to zombie kind as they are now. Could the change in him spread to others? Could that be why the boneys wanted to get to him?

He leans out the window and looks behind them, squinting through the dust behind the rig, and makes out a horde of boneys running after them. They’ve been left far behind already, but he knows they won’t stop.

He pulls himself back in the window, and sees the canyon pass coming up in the distance. “Drop the tanker.”

Furiosa looks over at him. They’d already prepared to drop it, but that was the plan to stop cars from following them, a plan they no longer needed to worry about. “Why?”

“They’ll follow,” he answers, hoping she’ll trust him because he doesn’t have time to explain. “It’ll stop the corpses… slow the boneys.” Very little other than a sheer wall would actually stop the boneys, agile as they are, but any time they can buy is invaluable, especially if something goes wrong between here and their destination.

Furiosa looks at him hard, glances at the upcoming pass, then in her side mirror. Finally she lets out a hard breath, reaches up and blows the rig’s horn three times.

The two women on the bike rush ahead of the rig, and the women on the tanker quickly move forward toward the cab.

Right before the pass, there’s a clunk and a snap, and the rig lurches. He leans out his window again and watches the tanker pull away, veer, and hit the narrow rocks of the pass, causing the archway to crumble and fall. He takes an unnecessary breath, and sits back in his seat. With any luck, that will provide enough of an obstacle to keep the boneys in the canyon for at least a little while.

He can sense that Furiosa is uncomfortable as they pull up to the base of the Citadel. The lift halts on its path downward as she pulls to a stop, and a man on the platform points a gun at the windshield.

“Reveal yourself!”

From the passenger seat, he watches Furiosa reach for her door, and he quickly puts his hand out to stop her. She hesitates and looks over at him.

“Might shoot,” he grunts out. “I should go first in case he does…”

“You’re not immune to being shot,” she argues.

He’s not and he knows it. If the lift guard decided to shoot him in the head, he’d be a goner. But being able to survive being shot elsewhere isn’t why he suggested it. He shakes his head. “You’re… more important.” He’s a nobody to them. Furiosa has the best chance of getting them up to the top, and can’t do that if she’s dead.

Furiosa opens her mouth to argue again, but he’s already opening the door and climbing over onto the hood. He tries to keep his back straight, hopes he doesn’t look too pale anymore, hopes his eyes aren’t too dead. If they identify him as a corpse, he’s definitely a goner. He keeps his hands up by his shoulders as he balances on the hood. There’s a tense silence, but no gunshots, and after a moment, Furiosa opens her door and joins him on the hood.

“Furiosa! Furiosa!” The crowd below calls out her name as they recognize her.

She moves beside him and looks up at the men on the platform. She takes a breath to speak, but his eyes widen as he sees one of the men on the platform raise his gun a little higher, and he steps quickly to the side, trying to put himself between Furiosa and the gun. There’s one shot, then a second. He jerks, the first shot hitting him in the side, the other in the chest. Behind him he hears Furiosa grunt, and he glances over his shoulder while keeping himself steady on his feet. She’s gripping her side with a grimace, but she’s still standing.

The man on the platform lowers his gun, seeming a little shocked that both took shots and didn’t go down.

“Joe is dead,” Furiosa announces loudly, the pain in her voice barely audible. “The armies are gone.”

There’s a deathly silence all around them, and he keeps himself between her and the gun.

“Old Joe is dead!” Someone echoes her from the crowd below, and a roar of celebration rises around them. After a minute a chant of “let them up, let them up” emerges through the roar of the crowd, and it’s only a few moments after that that the lift suddenly starts moving, lowering the rest of the way to the ground.

Furiosa takes a step back and sits against the top of the cab, her hand still pressed to her side, but her face is stony. As the lift hits the ground, the truck lurches forward, someone having moved into the driver’s seat to drive the rig onto the lift. The two on the motorcycle follow close beside them.

There’s cheering and the roar of water falling as the lift starts to carry them upward, but once he’s sure nobody’s going to try to shoot again, the whole of his attention is focused on Furiosa. He puts his hand to his own side as he turns toward her. He can feel an exit wound as well as an entry wound. The bullet must have passed through him and hit her. He kneels down to look.

“Don’t think it hit anything vital,” she says through her grimace, but he can’t help but notice the splatter of his own dark blood across her front where her hand is pressed, and he stares in horror. If his bite in the bloodstream of a living person can turn them, what would his blood do?

Chapter Text

It becomes clear something is wrong as the lift reaches the platform at the top. Furiosa can feel a cold, almost numbness in her side, slowly spreading outward with each beat of her heart. Gently, she peels her hand away from where it is pressed to the wound, and that’s when she notices the splatter of dark corpse blood around the area.

She swears.

The corpse must be following the same line of thought, because he’s looking between her wound and her face with concern, his hands twitching as if to do something about it, though it’s clear he doesn’t know what to do.

She doesn’t know what corpse blood in her system will do, but she can only assume it’s the same as a bite.

War Pups and wretched alike are swarming around the Rig now, and the other women are out of the cab, except Weaver who is still behind the wheel, and is the first to realize something is wrong.

“You’re shot,” she says urgently as she opens the door and starts to climb onto the hood.

Furiosa grimaces, putting her hand back over the wound. “I’m shot and it went through him first.”

The corpse is looking both panicked and apologetic.

With a sharp whistle, Weaver gains the others’ attention, and they start helping Furiosa down from the hood of the Rig.

Furiosa doesn’t remember much after that.

The next thing she knows, she’s waking up on the floor of a quiet passageway in the Citadel, every single person from the Rig crowded around and over her. The corpse’s hand is on the side of her neck, but he pulls it away quickly as she opens her eyes and tries to sit up.

“Heart’s working again,” he grunts out, and she can feel a collective, relieved release of breath from everyone around her.

What the hell just happened? She feels like hell.

“So she’s… still alive?” Cheedo’s voice easily gives away the fear she can sense from all of them.

The corpse sniffs the air lightly, then shakes his head, an expression of confusion on his face. “Smells alive… but also not.”

“’Scuse me?” Furiosa slurs. She’d really like some answers, and now.

Furiosa looks up and around, her head still a little muddled, and the corpse suddenly moves in a way to follow her gaze. He leans in toward her quickly, his eyes staring hard into hers. She moves back instinctively as he encroaches on her space.

“Your eyes,” he says with a tone of surprise. “They’re… different.”

“What do you mean different?” Valkyrie half pushes him out of the way as she moves in to look herself.

He doesn’t seem bothered by it. “Not like a corpse’s… but close.”

Furiosa groans and presses her hand to her side again. Her belts aren’t quite in the right place, and there’s a cloth bunched under one of them over the wound, soaked with blood. She feels light-headed.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” Gale says urgently. “Whether she’s alive or not, she’s not going to be much longer if we don’t do something.”

The corpse grunts, stands, and then slowly helps her to her feet, and she’s far shakier on them than she would like. Her head throbs in beats. Furiosa groans again as she hangs on to him for balance, and can’t help but notice the sound she makes sounds a little less than human. But maybe it’s just the blood loss making her think that.

Only the War Boy with them seems to have any idea how to get around the Citadel, but at least the task of helping them get her to her quarters, and then directing a few of them on how to get to the Blood Shed where they might find some more medical supplies, is enough to keep her focused and awake.

The corpse has just barely eased her down onto her bed when she’s already tackling the next problem at hand. Gale and a couple of the other Vuvalini have left to seek out the Blood Shed, but the rest are either fussing over her or looking on with worry, and they really don’t have time for this.

“We need to find out how many of Joe’s forces are still here.” She tries to steady her voice. She knows she doesn’t need to hide weakness with these people like she would have if she were still commanding War Boys, but it’s habit at this point. “The Imperators should all be gone, but some of the sicker War Boys probably got left behind.” Her mind races through a roll call of people Joe had at his disposal. “Corpus needs to be contained before he causes trouble. He may be able to keep the guards on his side. War Pups won’t be able to fight, but you never know if they—“

Capable comes forward, puts her hands on Furiosa’s shoulders, and tries to ease her down onto the mattress. “You’re hurt, you need to take it easy. Leave the rest up to us, okay? We can do it.”

Furiosa studies her, for a moment not completely convinced, but then she lets up and lets Capable push her down until she’s lying flat on her back. She heaves a sigh, and grimaces at the pain it shoots through her side.

Eventually most of the others leave to deal with Citadel affairs, and a while later the Mothers who had gone in search of the Blood Shed come back with the necessary supplies, and Furiosa resigns herself to letting them take care of her. They take off her prosthetic arm, remove her corset, and clean and treat the wound on her side.

It’s only after she’s properly bandaged and lying back that she realizes she hasn’t seen the corpse in a while. Did he go off to help with getting the Citadel under control? That’s probably not a good idea, she realizes. People here might recognize him as one of the Citadel’s previously captive corpses. And even if not, up close, he still looks just dead enough to probably get himself shot.

“Where is—“ She pushes herself up on her elbows and looks around as she starts to ask, but cuts herself off when she sees him. He’s pulled the stool away from her workbench and has set himself up in the corner with it. She’s briefly relieved to see him, but stops herself from collapsing back on the bed and takes a harder look at him.

He’s got his arms around himself almost like he’s cold, or maybe like he’s trying to protect himself. His posture is hunched, but not in the same listless way it had been when she had first met him. It looks more… deliberate. His eyes stare ahead, sloped toward the floor, but seem to be staring through it, and his face it strained, almost crumpled. It’s a strange expression she’s never seen on him.

“Corpse?” She asks, trying to get his attention. He doesn’t react.

“Living,” Angharad says quietly from the other corner of the room.

Chapter Text

He had noticed the feeling as the others were fussing over Furiosa, getting her settled, and as she started barking orders to them, he had separated himself from the group. By the time most of the others were leaving to deal with whatever issues Furiosa was concerned about, he was aware that he probably ought to sit down, because he was fairly sure he was on the verge of falling down.

He put himself in the corner, out of the way and where he had two walls to support himself against, and he tried to focus on the older women taking care of Furiosa. He was worried about her and wanted to make sure she would be okay, but whatever was going on with him soon started to take his attention away.

There was definitely something wrong. He was feeling things he had never felt before, and it took him some time to realize what some of those feelings were.

The first he managed to put his finger on was cold. It was the worst in his core. He had never really realized before how numb he had always been, until suddenly his whole body felt wrong. He didn’t really even have any baseline to understand that what he was feeling was cold, until he started to shiver, and some inkling, almost like a memory, told him that was a thing that happened when a person was cold.

The next was pain. It came on slowly, little pricks here and there on and in his body that made him wince, but they grew. He realized the sensation got even more uncomfortable if he put pressure on one of the points, and after a while, it was powerful enough that he decided it couldn’t have been anything other than pain. Every movement sent spikes of the sensation up his body and straight to his brain, where it all seemed to collect. It built up and built up until he could hardly think straight, and he put all his effort into keeping his body as still as possible. If he didn’t move, it hurt ever so slightly less.

The next sensation he noticed was more basic, at least to his dead brain. It at least wasn’t one that was completely new to him. He felt wetness on his skin, warmth spreading across it like the warmth of a fresh meal’s life spilling over his hands. It was apt that his brain first likened the feeling to that of fresh blood, because as he finally forced himself to move, grimacing against the pain as he opened his jacket and looked down at his chest where the biggest spot of warmth was spreading, blood was exactly what he saw.

He stared for a moment. It wasn’t brown-green and sluggish and gooey, it was red and vibrant and alive, and also quickly soaking the front of his shirt. He closed his jacket around himself again to hide it, and wrapped his arms tight around his body, as if that might protect him from the pain. He wheezed a bit, but tried to keep himself quiet. Everyone seemed distracted with Furiosa, and that, he thought, was how it should be anyway. She was the important one here, she was the one at risk of dying. It still hadn’t sunk into his head that red blood meant he was alive too, and that meant that he was now at risk of dying as easily as Furiosa.

It’s not until he hears the dead woman - Angharad - speak, that his eyes snap up and his awareness comes back to the room he’s in. Living, she said. Of course she would be able to tell, she’s a corpse, and though corpses’ senses are dulled in all other ways, a corpse’s nose never lies about whether someone is alive or not. It’s also then that he notices he can’t catch the scent of living or dead, though he knows there are both in this room, and one possibly in-between.

He stares in shock as it sinks in. The pain, the cold… Is this what it feels like to be alive?

There are… images in his head. Like the dream he had, but he’s not sleeping. Are these memories? He can’t grasp any of them very well. They dance around his head like twinkling lights, and as soon as he tries to focus on any one of them, it flickers out, becomes unclear, and slips away from him as if he were trying to grasp a handful of water.

But he catches impressions, brief glimpses. A boy on a bike. A heaping plate of pasta. A scraped knee. The cry of a baby. A warm smile and arms around him.

Furiosa pushes herself up on the bed, grimacing at her own pain, and one of the old women who had been taking care of her hurries over to urge her back down.

“You need to rest, or you’ll make yourself start bleeding again,” she says sternly.

Furiosa lets the woman push her back down, but barks an order of her own, half annoyance, half fear. “Check on him.”

He keeps himself pressed into the corner, his jacket still pulled tight around his body, and his arms over his chest to protect himself, as another of the women approaches him cautiously. They had accepted him, but he could tell they were still wary of him, and none had gotten closer to him than they had to.

He curls up a little tighter as she reaches for him.

“Hey,” the woman says gently as he somehow shrinks farther back into the corner. “Let me look.” She grasps his hand gently and pulls it away from his chest, then eases the other away as well. She still seems to be trying to keep her distance, still keeping him at arm’s length, until she opens his jacket and glimpses the blood blossoming across his chest.

“He’s… bleeding,” she announces to the others. She steps back, staring in surprise, like she doesn’t know what to do with this information. “He’s… alive.”

Despite fervent complaining from the woman taking care of her, Furiosa is suddenly out of bed, on her feet, and in front of him. His eyes dart up to her, and as her hand reaches out toward him, he makes himself relax slightly and lets her work his jacket down over his shoulders and off.

“Shit,” Furiosa says, laying her hand against the largest spot of blood spreading across his chest. He’s suddenly aware of a beating heart, and not hers, not like one he used to be able to sense from living prey, but his own. He almost thinks he can feel his blood pumping through his veins with each beat of it.

“Come on,” she says, seeming to sense him drifting off into his own head. “Get up, Fool. I’m not letting you die a second time.”

She pulls him up off the stool and leads him over toward the bed she had been on a minute ago.

“Max,” he says, and he’s not quite sure where that came from, but it feels like a memory. It feels right. “My name is Max.”