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The stories of Citadel are following him, and he finds it infuriating.
No matter how far he rides, no matter how many different settlements he comes across. He is a hundred days ride from the damn place, in the opposite direction he set off in. He is a hundred and fifty days gone from the place and their echoes follow him like the echoes of the long dead he can't shake.
He would be at peace with those echoes if they were like the kid, steeped in fire and blood and guilt. But these echoes come from other people. At night times, when he settles down beside the bike he lifted from one of the mass graves scattering the wastes, he hears whispers of a green place. Of a place of many mothers. It is spoken of with reverence, and he knows it to be a long dead lie, until he hears names he knows. Fragile. Capable. Furiosa.
Max makes stilted, grunting enquiries about this supposed green place. The most observant of them, a woman with thick curling hair, recognises memory in him. They barrage him with questions and he leaves without the rations they promised him in the morning. He could travel faster, further, but he prefers to spend his time in this intermediary zone, on the edges of the salt. He is never more than a thousand miles, ten days easy ride from the Citadel, if he hears of trouble. But he never does. He's not sure if that makes him glad or not.
The wastes are endless, and he rides alone, past rigs abandoned in the scorching sun. He rides alone through acrid muck and rot. Or, at least, he rides as alone as he'll ever be. Help us, Max. Max?
Other voices drown out the ones in his head, and he seeks the company of others once in a while. People gather in the dark, drawn to fires built for this purpose. Hushed whispers between ragged nomads tell stories, legends of the road. There's groundwater welling up ten days west of here, I filled my tanks and it doesn't taste too tainted, here. There's flax lillies growing around the edges of the swamp you crossed three days southeast of here, don't eat too many of the berries, I learned that the hard way. No, I'm serious, in that little clearing there's a field of parsnips, see?
But in amongst the practical tales, there are the real legends, and he hears the best of these three nights later, stretching his bad leg out in front of the fire after a hard day's ride with a group he's frankly surprised lasted this long.
He hears that she has one flesh arm and one made of silver, since she tore off the weaker one herself.
He hears that she single-handedly led a coup and founded a haven in the wastes.
He hears that she can cure the blind, the maimed.
He admires Furiosa, he can easily admit to himself. She is strong. Ruthless and forgiving in the right amounts; a good road warrior. But she is not a hero in the way these rumours twist and tell her stories. He joins in, just once, to see if they recognise their adulation for what it is. “I heard that her piss is pure water and she blesses the wretched with it.” They stare for a moment, and accept this new fact into their canon, nodding sagely with hums of agreement. One even claims to have heard that before, his wife's sister's merchant companion has felt the blessing himself, and Max barks out a rusty, grinding laugh. He can't stop, and it earns him a punch in the face for his troubles. He wheezes between maniacal fits of laughter, that maybe he should head to Citadel himself, have The Furiosa bless his new head wound.
That night, he leaves with the water and guzzoline promised to him. Partly because the ragtag band of wasteland travellers begrudgingly admitted that without him, passing the Buzzard caverns would have been much less successful. But mostly, because the cackling is unsettling and they want him to leave.
The wastes get harder, the further he travels. The people suffer more, and the alliances he makes are based less on the camaraderie of the road. The fury road is two hundred days behind him, and on the cool evenings, he still heads toward the trading fires, but here, he keeps his hand on his gun.
He trades a handle of foul tasting gutrot for a half tank of guzzoline. He trades a clip of bullets that don't fit his gun for water (he makes it sound a harder trade for him than it is, and ekes out another half container of water).
This is a different place to the places he has been in the last two hundred days. In this place, for the first time, he is surrounded entirely by other men. Not a large group, six men including himself, but large enough for the customs of old to rear up in their memories.
They eat, they drink, they size each other up. They break up a fight or two, and settle into a tense sort of peace. And then the game starts. Max remembers this one from his days on the force, played it more times than he can remember. It's a pissing contest, let's see who can hit the wall from here kind of thing. The road legends start, and they are far more colourful than the legends of five hundred miles east.
“Thirty days ride that way I met a girl who was so desperate for a feed she traded a root for a handful of roots,” someone offers to the company at large. The men snicker.
“That bad you gotta pay for it, eh?” another retorts. More snickering.
“Well, I got a blowie just three days ago.”
“Didja like the taste, mate?” And so it goes, men outdoing one another and cutting each other down. Dick waving. So long as he chuckles at the right times and nods at others, they don't expect him to join in.
And then the legends he's grown accustomed to start.
“I heard a couple of weeks back that there's a new colony setting up somewhere to the east. Completely ruled by women.” Gut-rot takes a sip from the dusty container. “Let's see how long it is before the road legends say that it's burned to the ground.” There's raucous laughter and agreement.
“I've heard of that one. Apparently they've got an army of men doing their dirty work, going on raids and protecting them from outsiders.” “Why would any bloke let that happen to him?”
“Maybe they've got magic bits. And I'm not talking about the one with the scrap-metal arm.” More laughter follows from the men. Except Max.
“The lot of 'em are called the Wives, I hear. Bet they know their way around a cock or two.” Max curls his hands into fists, balls them into the sand next to him. His face remains blank.
“Who would you rather, the wives, or their bitch bulldog with the arm?”
“I like a bit of fight in a girl, reckon she'd pack a punch with that metal.”
And so it goes. The insults and the threats get more disgusting and more graphic. Dick waving. Pissing contest. Not a single one of them is innocent.
Just cause.
Max seethes. He gets up, shaking his brace into the right position before swinging his leg over the bike. The hoots and derisive hollers from the men ring in his ears as he prepares to leave. They say he's gonna go and get himself a feel of those girls. He's gonna give himself a hand after their stories. He would have liked their stories better if they'd been about little boys.
He creeps back three hours later, walking his bike back to them silently through the night. On the night of no moon he casts no shadow over their sleeping forms. First he siphons as much guzzoline as he can take from their cars and bikes. He is sure this is the first time in decades his fuel tank has ever been full. He raids their panniers for rations, comes up with a few delightful keepsakes.
The last time he was this angry did not end well for the man involved. Cuffs. Car. Explosion. Fire and blood, and he revels in the memory that floods his head. Max deftly lifts the blade from the hands of the sleeping figure who called her a bulldog bitch. He runs it across the man's throat, hand covering his mouth. His last filthy words are a gurgling gory hiss from his newly formed mouth. Four more.
One described his hypothetical conquest of her with words that made Max sick to think on. Him, he binds up loosely with trappings from his van, dipped in guzzoline.
Another suggested he'd take the youngest, the prettiest, and him? Max binds him and gags him, carving the name of the one he wants to claim into his chest. His muffled screaming wakes the three others, and Max silences him with a knife in the eye. It's a shame: he only managed the CH. Three left. The one who was bound throws himself upright, and stumbles into the embers of the fire. He ignites. Two left – one young, one old.
They circle him, hissing and spitting like feral things.
They did not expect Max to also be a feral thing.
They attack at the same time, and Max throws himself backwards into the arms of the older man, knocking him to the ground. He feels a crunch as he throws his head back – his nose is probably broken. His fingers scrabble for purchase in the cracked leather of his jacket, and he throws his head back again, this time the crunch is more of a smear, and the man beneath him groans and stills, panting hard, instead reaching his hands for his own face.
The younger man takes his moment and kicks Max hard in the groin. He grunts, all of the air knocked from him, and he rolls off the other, instinctively curling up. Kicks rain down on him, and he grabs the outstretched leg, pulling the boy off balance, to land heavily on Max's gut. He braces for the impact, but he's already winded from earlier, and the two of them groan. The boy sees his advantage and immediately claws at Max's face. He catches two fingers in his mouth and bites, hard, grinding finger bones between his back teeth. He shrieks shrilly, pulling his mangled hand from Max's jaws; he spits blood in his face.
The two men cradle their injuries in balls on the ground as Max hauls himself up. The younger man screams, eyes brimming with tears, and he shouts at Max. “What the fuck?”
He grunts, gathering himself. “Not things. Women. They're not things.”
“This is about stupid talk about bitches you don't even know? You killed three men, you crazy fuck!”
Max repeats himself. “Not things. They're not yours to own, or fuck, or hurt.” He hauls himself back onto his bike, trying to hide the wince when he sits down. “Remember that. An' me.”
He starts the ignition, heavily loaded up, and heads east. If the men out here think like that, then the men everywhere think like it, too.
He leaves the bodies behind to be devoured by the sand.
And he discovers, five days hard ride later, that rumours travel both ways. The women have heard of an angel out in the wastes, bringing death to those who threaten their way of life. The women see him, bloodied to the elbows and layered thick with dust and dirt, and they understand.
Furiosa catches him up on the road legends that find their way back here as she crops his hair, totally unsalvageable, matted with blood and road dust. The rumour that she is some sort of goddess doesn't please her. She confesses that the rumour that she blesses the people with her waste water is even less pleasing to her, and Max laughs, long and loud.