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Grit and dust, as far as the eye can see, squinting against the sun. Heat is reflected by the sand, bouncing back against a layer of CO2, coming back down. It’s merciless. Unyielding. Making the air sizzle with a ferocity reminiscent of chirping cicadas that have long since died out. Only the bugs cling on. Lizards. Desert vermin.
If ever there was a green place, it is confined to memory now, and when those carrying the memories are dead, it will be as if it never even existed. It will die with them.
Max doesn’t remember. He has seen the charred remains of trees, the ashes of this world. He knows the kind of people who survive here, he is one of them.
Standing atop a dune he has let the heat cook his brain into a trance until he swears he can see water and trees at the horizon. It’s a Fata Morgana. Just like hope.
He remembers what he said to Furiosa.
In the distance, a howling front of sandstorms is edging steadily closer, closer still, and Max tucks the scarf across his face before he turns and mounts his bike. He is too far from his hideout, the squabble of rocks that might provide cover, and too close to the Citadel. The motor howls before the bike sets into motion, wheels spurting up sand behind him as he speeds down into the valleys between the dunes.
Max might find a way around the storm, circle back. He scans the horizon again, and sees nothing but a wall of desert scooped up by the wind, stretching into all directions. He doesn’t know if he can trust his eyes that feel dry like raisins by now. Traitors to the rest of his body. Just like his leg.
It’s madness, to go back to the Citadel, but the storm chases him like a sentient being, like it has spotted him disappearing between the dunes and reappearing again, and it’s approaching ever faster.
He has survived one of these storms, Max thinks, dug himself out afterwards to find himself still chained to Nux. Will he be that lucky again?
The first flurries of upheaved dunes appear at his sides and lash out at his machine and Max zig zags around them, urging the bike to go faster, chanting in his head.
The gates of the Citadel appear out of nowhere. Walls lined with War Boys that have discarded their white paint, but the reflection of binoculars gives them away. They know Max. Could spot him from a mile, probably. And so they open the gates, letting Max haul his bike over the drawbridge before the storm can get the better of him.
“Max,” Furiosa says, meeting him among an escort of excited War Boys. Max flinches. It’s still — people knowing his name, it’s still — he doesn’t have a word for it.
“Furiosa,” he says. She looks the same, only cleaner.
“Did you come to get a haircut?” she asks. Max touches his head, surprised to find long, filthy strands of something that indeed must be hair growing from it.
“Maybe,” he grunts, taking in the lines around Furiosa’s mouth. No, she doesn’t look the same.
“Almost didn’t recognise you,” she says. “Welcome home.”
And Max flinches again, but he follows her through the caves, the maze of tunnels he escaped what seems like an eternity ago and yet not long enough. She leaves him then, with Capable, and when Furiosa turns his eyes catch on the old brand of Immortan Joe’s skull on her neck and he wonders why she kept it, why she hasn’t painted it over like many of the others did.
Capable runs him a bath in one of the old chambers, a tub of water. Clean water.
“I don’t bathe,” Max says, and his throat feels raspy with the words, more than he has spoken in a year. He needs that layer of dirt like a baby needs a blanket, for protection.
“You have to,” says Capable. “You have blisters on your face, didn’t you notice? Sunburn. It needs to be clean before I can give you an ointment.”
Max takes a minute, for the sounds her mouth is making to reach his ears, to travel up to his sluggish brain, to be strung to a sentence, to make sense. He walks to the side of the tub then, and plunges his face in, and rubs at it. It burns worse than the sun, the water, entering cracks in his skin he didn’t know existed.
Capable is ruthless with the ointment, and with his hair, and with his dignity.
“You almost look like yourself again,” she says, when they’re done and he’s still dirty, but his face is clean and his hair is short.
“Hm,” Max mumbles, which equates to thanks in his vocabulary. He rubs his head and walks over to the window, but he can only see the gorge between the mountain chunks they’re living in from here.
“The storm, did it pass?” he asks.
Capable tilts her head. “What storm?”
It’s night when Max wakes up, cramped on an assortment of bags and blankets.
He listens to the darkness, to the sound of his heart beating steadily. No nightmares. But Max is wide awake, even before the shouting starts, and the drums, and the roar of engines fills the air like the buzzing of flies that have found dead meat.
He’s on his feet, strapping all the guns he can find to his belt, before darting out the door of the room they gave him. Furiosa knocks down her own door, running at his side, in the process of fastening the prosthesis to her arm.
“Spikeheads,” she says.
From all ends of the tunnels, War Boys are running, spilling out of the mouth of the caves and into the gorge and into cars.
Max takes his motorcycle while Furiosa slides into the driver’s seat of her upgraded War Rig. All around them, War Boys are gearing up in vehicles, not as many as there used to be under Immortan Joe. Furiosa salutes Max before slamming the door, as if saying “It’s good you’re here.”
A War Boy on another bike rolls up next to Max, grins, shouts: “Fuck, it’s such an honour to ride with you.”
And Max thinks, power changes hands, but old habits die hard. Then the War Boys start chanting their names. The bridge is lowered.
Furiosa, Furiosa, Furiosa.
Max, Max, Max.
They ride out.
The Spikeheads are firing the first round of grenades at the stronghold walls, sending chunks of rocks flying off and around. Max dodges and watches the War Boy who’d just shouted at him get crushed under the rust coloured earth.
Soon, the air is filled with screams and the smell of explosions. The boys manage to completely blast the spikes off one of the Spikehead’s cars, right in front of Max, and he takes his chance, yanking his bike onto the hood and shooting the better half of a magazine through the windshield and into the Spikeheads before he’s over the car and flying, losing hold on the machine between his thighs. He knows he’s gonna crash, can only bring his arms up to shield his head and let go of the bike. It hits the ground before he does, and he doesn’t, because something much harder than sand catches him around the middle, knocking the air out of his lungs, and he finds himself draped over the hood of the War Rig, ducking his head just in time as his motorcycle goes blowing up a Spikehead gas tank and sending a blast of fire his way. Max rolls over the hood and climbs into the passenger door.
Falling in synch with Furiosa is easy as driving a car, dozens of joints working together, pushing, pulling. He feels her movements like another limb.
And the weight of their survival forces them onwards.
Max sees no sense in counting the dead. They assemble them into mounds, next to the rubble piling up, what’s left of the Citadel’s damaged walls. He drags back the rocks that hit the War Boy, the one he knew for a split second. It’s too bad he didn’t get to live. But then again, who does?
At the end of the night, the sun rises red, moving its hot fingers across the desert and Max can feel the blood dry on his face, his throat, his hands.
He takes a bath.
Furiosa is limping when she enters the healing room and sets down her guns, and strips off her arm. Max hands her a damp washcloth and she wipes the motor oil off her forehead, and underneath, her eyes are the colour and brightness of chrome. She turns to unwrap her clothes and puts on new ones. Max can see the scar where he punctured her chest cavity, and his throat aches with sentences he has no words and no vocal chords for.
Music and literature are lost on this world. There is only the beat of war drums. The beating of hearts, pumping blood, fighting. Max knows the kind of people who survive here. He’s one of them, possessed by desert fever.
If there ever was a green place, it is confined to memory now, and when those carrying the memories are dead, it will be as if it never even existed.
Max leaves the room to take inventory. He’s got five guns left, loaded. He fills two canteens with water. He bandages the cuts on his body and dismisses the bruises. He adjusts the brace on his leg.
He nods to the War Boys on his way out.
“You’re leaving again,” Furiosa says, suddenly behind him, ten yards distance and watching Max stop in his tracks in front of the demolished gates.
“The salt lands,” Max says, walking back a few paces. “I want to know what comes after.”
“Why?”
“You know why.” She’s like him, she doesn’t belong here, Max thinks. She belongs on the Fury Road. He has words, suddenly. Three of them, and he’s not sure whether he wants them to be enough or too little.
“You should come.”
“Home is here now,” Furiosa says.
Max looks around, gestures at the smoking corpses behind them and the walls that are rubble now.
Furiosa follows his eyes. “You build it. It falls. You build again,” she says.
“Your choice.”
She nods.
“Got a ride?” Max asks.
“Got a ride that will get you to the ends of the world.”
It’s been three hours on the new bike, loaded with supplies and water, riding through the midday heat, when Max starts to notice a sound that’s faint at first, and might be the wind howling in his ears, but it doesn’t stop when he dips into the valleys between the dunes. The sound of another bike. Following him. It might be just another Fata Morgana or his mind playing tricks on him. Desert Fever. Madness.
Max turns his machine around and waits.
And hopes.