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i.
The world doesn’t end in a day.
He and Jessie are young, naive. They hold onto hope, despite the wars for oil and the oceans they say are drying up. They hold onto hope and onto their son, despite watching the shoreline reach away from them, the sands ambitious now the tides are not returning.
He knows of the state of the world, and for a time stands in its way where he can. Even the ideals of the bronze badge can't smother his own ambition, envying the spiraling decline to what some might call freedom. He and Jessie pass the time, disregarding the calendar, ignoring the fires and fighting and time stamps on the news. The world hasn’t really touched them. Not yet.
When it does, he can feel the weight and the walls of it close around him. He walks into the ICU to find his best mate. He walks out and away from charred remains, confronted by the monsters that have been lurking beneath the surface he’d been trying so hard not to breach himself.
So he runs. Takes Sprog and Jessie
and runs.
He is not fast enough.
He is never there when they need him.
He starts counting in days when he reaches their side; what’s left of his son, what’s left of her.
On the second day he sells his soul to a demon in a metal body, soldered together from passion and despair, assembled by anxious-idle hands to keep the world away. It’s steeped in black from tip to tailpipe, its heart a supercharged V8. This demon wants out just as much as he does. This demon wants freedom and vengeance just as much as he does.
The demon takes, and takes. It takes him through the night as it sets in like a black bag over his head, executioner and executionee in one. It takes him down the expanse of blacktop to find his targets, to hunt them. It takes him across the bridge, tires squealing, engine roaring birthright; of the road, of the other damned souls. It takes his physical pain and pushes it aside when his entire purpose narrows to destroying the last fleeing motorcycle.
It takes his victory in the carnage of the chase and what’s left of the wreckage. It takes the last of his compassion and drags it under the chassis, leaving fewer chunks behind than Johnny the Boy.
It takes the rage in his veins, cycles it through the supercharger like nitro and feeds it back to him.
It takes the small moments, the mornings, the touches
It takes the startled laughter, the gentle kisses
It takes the evenings, the reason. It takes the movements of their hands for ‘crazy about you’. Buries it deep as he wants it to go, burning, burning.
It takes Sprog.
It takes Jessie.
It takes his insides and rips them out, head echoing with the static of uncertain kindness and slow tendrils of music that feel like home. It takes it all and locks it away in a vault as violent and callous and swift as the storms that have swallowed the cities and left only feral scavengers standing.
It leaves him with the clothes on his back and an instinct to survive. By any means. He isn’t sure from where the latter comes. Somewhere in him he lacks the will. The demon takes his capacity to question ‘why survive?’
But he does.
The demon knows he needs it as much as it needs him.
There’s two sets of crosses he leaves in the dust that was once his home. Keeps his eyes off the red sun’s fading light bouncing off their metal skeletons. They will rust and crumble before he does. He doesn’t go back.
And his car won’t let him die.
ii.
One always crawls back to the other, a leech reattaching to an open wound. Or he rebuilds his car, as compelled to keep moving as he is to stay alive.
It is not the first, nor the last time the body of his car has been completely destroyed, with or without him in it, when the scavs run him down to steal his guzzoline and kill his dog. It is day 751. It is also not the first or last time he’s lost days, to unreliable consciousness or recall. He shouldn’t have survived that crash. The next time he can count, he marks the day 752. It’s still day 752 when he volunteers to drive the rig, as beset by the scavs as they are. He thinks he does it because he has nothing left to lose; he thinks he does it for revenge, to repay the scavs for what they did to his car. He doesn’t do it in exchange for small pieces of his soul back.
It is day 1095. He’s not sure if it’s considered an anniversary, but it’d be the third. The names of his family don’t leave his parched lips. He wasn’t there for them, again. The dehydration doesn’t kill him.
It is day 1095 and it’s the first time he sees the dead for what they really are: Accusing. He nearly wrecks his resurrected car when he looks in the cracked rearview, the ghost of a woman he barely knew sitting in the hollowed out space, staring. Grim. She knows. She tells him. Accusing.
It’s the thermonuclear skirmish that evaporates what’s left of oceans, turns old and new blood to ash. He can’t help but watch as mushroom clouds blossom against the sky from behind the front support columns of the demon he made a deal with. He doesn’t disintegrate in the wake of the blasts or in the fallout. He thinks it’s day 2249. They watch, too. The dead. As the rest of the world burns, they say nothing to him, for once.
He can feel the atmospheric pressure shift in his blown-out knee. Imagines the radiation that should be eating at his bones. He grows snaggle tooth and snaggle hair, but there’s no getting older, no getting sicker. The demon’s metal body needs repairs as often as he does, but both still function fit enough to run. He’s forgotten how many days make up a year. No need to know it anymore. It is day 3982.
He starts over, counting from 4000, on day 4330.
It is not the last time he is separated from his car. It is not the last time he will find it in the guts of an encampment, wallowing in shit, turned into something he barely recognizes. It is not the first time he’s overwhelmingly relieved to be reunited with it. He counts the day 5161, and refuses to kill in the dome of a cage, a deal busted. On 5162 the encampment exiles him into the dunes. It is day 5166 when they mistake him; when he refuses to take them home. It is day 5169 when he clears a path for the plane to take them home, instead.
It is long before day 10000 that he stops counting; that he crawls back to the demon in the metal body; that he finds a way to rebuild it.
It is after day 11342 Glory the Child asks him to paint her name across the sands in their blood. She, too, accuses him.
Someone else’s day 12045 is scratched into his skin in the bowels of a citadel. Separated, again, from his car. It’s not a friend, by now, exactly. He finds out what it’s like to be a hood ornament; a blood bag. It is day 12061 when he agrees to drive the rig, escaping the citadel’s reach just as much as they are. It’s not revenge; not running, not yet. It is day 12063 when he lets them ride towards their deaths. It is still day 12063 when he suggests they go back the way they came, back to the citadel. It is a hard day 12063 when she asks, ‘bring them home’. Somewhere in him he thinks he’s doing it for small pieces of his soul back.
It will be another 10000 days and more pieces of himself to bargain with. One has crawled back to the other; his demon now shine as chrome, leaner. Meaner. There’s a grinning skull to match its game.
Another 10000 days to wonder if those he’s crossed paths with have died long ago or rusted and crumbled with time. Another 10000 days to run from his ghosts on a dry, spherical planet.
The world doesn’t end in a day.
It never stops ending
and his car won’t let him die.