Chapter 7 : The Buzzard Ambush
Metal screamed against metal.
The Buzzard vehicle that hit my ride was a nightmare of welded spikes and grinding teeth—a spiked dozer that had erupted from the sand like some burrowing predator and slammed into the War Boy pursuit car at full speed. The impact threw me from the flatbed, and for three endless seconds I was airborne, watching the desert spin beneath me.
The Armor moved.
It spread across my back and shoulders in a rippling wave, thickening into impact plating a fraction of a second before I hit the sand. The landing still drove the breath from my lungs, still sent pain lancing through my spine, but I was rolling instead of shattering. Momentum carried me thirty meters before I managed to dig my heels in and stop.
Chaos surrounded me.
The Buzzard ambush had turned the pursuit into a three-way war. Spiked vehicles burst from hidden sand pits in every direction, their drivers howling through gas-mask respirators as they rammed War Boy cars and pursuit bikes alike. The War Boys were fighting back—some of them, anyway. Others had abandoned the Buzzards entirely and were pressing toward the War Rig, single-minded in their devotion to Joe's property.
The Rig itself was fifty meters ahead, cutting through the melee like a battleship through a storm. I could see defenders on its platforms—women, not War Boys, wielding rifles and improvised weapons. And at the wheel, visible through the cab's armored glass, a figure with a shaved head and a mechanical arm wrestling the massive vehicle through impacts that should have flipped it.
Furiosa.
Move, the Armor urged. The big metal. Go.
I pushed myself upright and ran.
A Buzzard vehicle swerved toward me—opportunistic predator spotting wounded prey. I didn't stop, didn't even slow. The Armor extended ahead of my reaching hands, hungry for the vehicle's spiked chassis, and when I grabbed the protruding metal rod that served as its front grille decoration, the film spread across it like water finding cracks.
The driver's eyes went wide behind his mask. He yanked the wheel. The vehicle spun sideways, momentum too great to stop, and I let go at the perfect moment to add its speed to my own.
Another thirty meters closer to the Rig.
A War Boy bike roared past me, close enough that I could see the rider's chrome-sprayed teeth. He didn't even look at me—too focused on the Rig, on glory, on Valhalla. Another Buzzard intercepted him before he could close, their collision sending both vehicles cartwheeling into a fireball.
Twenty meters.
The Rig's defenders were focused on the vehicles attacking from all sides. No one was watching for a single figure sprinting across open sand. I reached the Rig's flank and jumped, fingers finding purchase on a cargo netting that hung from the tanker's side.
The Armor helped. It gripped the metal beneath the netting, anchored me against the Rig's momentum, and let me climb while the wind tried to tear me free.
I crested the edge of the rear platform and found a wrench swinging at my face.
Threat, the Armor screamed. React—
I ducked. The wrench whistled past my temple close enough to feel the displaced air. The woman holding it—dark skin, sharp eyes, hair cut close to her skull—was already winding up for a second swing.
"I'm not with them!" I threw my hands up, empty palms forward. "The War Boys—I'm not with them!"
She hesitated. Behind me, a War Boy pursuit bike was closing fast, its rider already reaching for a grappling hook.
I pointed. "That's with them."
The woman glanced past me, assessed, and made a decision. The wrench came down—not on my head, but on the grappling hook that embedded in the platform beside me. She pried it loose and kicked it off the edge, sending the War Boy rider jerking sideways as his line went slack.
"Furiosa!" she shouted toward the cab. "Passenger!"
A voice came back through the wind—flat, hard, brook-no-argument. "If he fights, he stays. If he doesn't, push him off."
The woman—Toast, I remembered from the movie, Toast the Knowing—studied me for a half-second longer. Then she shoved the wrench into my hands.
"Starboard side. They're climbing."
I turned toward the Rig's right flank and found two Buzzard scavengers hauling themselves over the edge, their spiked gloves digging into the tanker's metal skin. The first one was already on the platform, a jagged blade in his hand.
The Armor wanted to extend. To form blades of its own, to armor my fists, to do what it was designed to do. I clamped down on that instinct—too visible, too many witnesses—and swung the wrench instead.
The impact jarred my shoulders. The Buzzard's blade went flying. A second swing caught him in the ribs and sent him staggering backward into his climbing partner. They both went over the edge.
The third Buzzard came from my blind side.
I turned too late. The spiked rod in his hands punched toward my chest with killing force, aimed at my heart—
The Armor moved without my permission.
It surged across my torso, thickening from film to plate in the fraction of a second before impact. The spike hit my chest and stopped. Metal deformed against metal. The force still threw me backward, still knocked the air from my lungs, but when I looked down, the rod was flattened against my chest like it had hit a steel wall.
I was alive. The spike should have impaled me, and I was alive.
Toast was staring.
I ripped the flattened rod from my chest—the Armor released it reluctantly, hungry for the metal—and used it as a lever against the Buzzard who'd thrown it. He went over the side screaming.
The ambush was ending. The Buzzards were falling back into the sand, retreating to their burrows to count their spoils. The War Boy pursuit had scattered—some vehicles destroyed, others regrouping far behind.
But inside the Rig, I could feel eyes on me.
Toast approached slowly, her gaze fixed on the spot where the spike had flattened. The metal there was dented, compressed, clearly showing the impact pattern of a blow that should have killed any normal person.
"That should have gone through you," she said.
"Armor. Under my clothes." The lie came automatically. "Salvaged it. Wasteland survival."
Her eyes dropped to my exposed forearms, where the gray-silver film of the Armor was visible if you knew what to look for. The same film that had just saved my life by hardening faster than any salvaged plate could explain.
She said nothing. Just reached out, picked up a loose bolt from the platform, and dropped it into my hand.
I felt the Armor twitch toward it—hunger, always hunger—and tightened my grip before it could absorb the metal in front of her.
"Keep it," she said. "For repairs."
Then she turned and walked toward the cab, leaving me alone on the rear platform with a bolt burning a hole in my palm and questions burning in her eyes.
Inside the Rig, through the slats of a hidden compartment, five women stared at me. They'd seen the spike. Seen the impossible survival. And at least one of them—the one with red hair and calculating eyes—was already counting the things that didn't add up.
The Buzzards disappeared into the sand. The War Boys fell back. And ahead, rising like a wall of death against the horizon, the sandstorm waited.
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