How many ? How many days have passed since the Fall, which is called Apokalipsis down bellow under-the-sands ? Eighteen thousand, it is said, even if the amounts of time are much harder to handle than those of bolts. It is more – in any case – much more than most half-lives can claim to have experienced.
What did these lands look like before the desert consumed them? Before the electric winds swept away what the Oil and Water Wars had saved? The Wasteland keep traces of it, like so many marks on a mutilated body. Inert things that the ancients call Derev'ya – trees – still raise their cracked messy branches for crows. Words are still whispered, legends: those of the Boeings, winged giants that one day crossed the sky, those of black-grease grounded Highways. Fables. Abstruse symbols that still litter the ground where the carcasses of fallen vehicles lie. There on the Fury Road.
Once his engine is off, Volta scrapes the sand with the tip of her boot. Ford. Another badge she already has. Twice. Thrice. She's sure to catch a glimpse of a Chevrolet bumper, deeper into this mess of rubble. Quickly, she raises her goggled, rimmed in leather, up to the shapeless dirty scarf that covers her head. Then she picks up the metal thing. it's half burnt but still better than -
A whistle, and she looks up. At the canyon top, the Rockryders are leaving. Here is their territory, their rocky pass. Their toll point too, from which they greatly benefit because no convoy can afford to bypass the mountains. Their tax is paid in Guzzolene, Aquacola, Nestlait or Lectricity, but they will not ask anything this time. None of them will pay attention neither to her, nor to any of the Buzzards out of Sunken City, nor to their current looting: what was interesting or valuable to them, they have already taken. Now, they simply let them clear away the remnants of this never-seen-before pile of shattered machines.
— Davaï, Volta, yells one of her fellows in a voice that has already roared too much in the sound of engines.
The teenager makes a OK sign, her thumb and index finger closed in a circle. Novic. Leaving with a downpour of sand, a cluster of doors stacked on a pole at the front of his Staryytako. Right among the sharp spikes of his car. !in less than an hour, he will have melted it: Volta knows it and she stretches a smile under the harsh linen. The Buzzards – the Kanyuk as they call themselves – are not reusing the parts they collect – sometimes by scavenging, sometimes by deliberately attacking desperate convoys crossing their northern territories. They stopped giving a second life to the pieces of the Old World a long time ago: now they create their own universes from scratch. Rims, hoods, axles have only one name: Metall. A raw material like any other, from which they shape their burried city and their other facilities.
Volta comes from most distant colony and maybe that's why her clan somewhat differs from the other Buzzards tribes. An enclave. Hidden underground under the chaos of the eternal storm sweeping the borders of their grounds. A series of bunkers buried in the midst of windy tumults, of which only lightning rods protrude into this hell of sand and ocher. Of all the Buzzards, of all the souls that still breathe in the Wasteland, the Iskra are the only ones who know how to catch lightning. To constrain it or release it from what everyone call batteries. The are also the only ones who know how to use the infinity of sand that sums up their existence. To blow the Stekloglass. To shape bulbs inside which they breathe light from their Lectricity. This is their only trade with the Citadel, with Gastown, with the Bullet Farm. The reason why they gibberish this mixture of English and Russian better than the other Buzzards. The way they supply their engines with Guzzolene and their offspring with water.
Volta lifts the badge up to her eyes and look at it. Blue, with orange shimmers in the sunset. Why does she like these stupid things ? She is not about to melt them: she will simply slip them into the box which fits under her berth. She doesn't know. Keeping them is a reflex, a mechanical gesture that calms her down amid the roars of the storm, when back to the Bunkers. A kollektsiya, as the eldest Iskra would say. A useless fad that she will keep secret forever. But yet, she pockets the Ford, then shakes her head and focus on what she came for.
YOU ARE READING
I live, I die, I live again (Mad Max: Fury Road fanfiction)
FanfictionOver the hours, strange whispers have echoed through the Wasteland. It is said that the three Leaders have just died on the Fury Road, even Immortan Joe whom the Citadel held for a god. It is rumored that his remains were deposited at the gates of h...
