Here is a super teeny-tiny chapter, because I'm sure you'd rather have a short chapter than nothing at all.

Warning- Max kinda-sorta ingests someone else's blood, but he's not eating people and he's not doing it because he thinks blood is yummy.


Two.


He hasn't been walking for long before realizing he can sense a gathering of cells, not his own, chew and split and swell. Uck. Tumors. He hates tumors. He thought he had seen the worst of them come and gone after the flare-up of radiation sickness after the water wars, but they seem to be in abundance here. He saw more than plenty on theā€¦ what did they call themselves?

Ah. War Boys.

Well, no matter. Tumors are tumors. He'll have to kill these before they choke the boy.

But they'll choke the boy soon. They're fat and demanding, not pressed all that near the windpipe but still applying too much pressure in the neck, and they're bigger than they look. Max can hear it in the way he breathes. There's too much pressure. Too much bad flesh.

Max sets him down in the dirt and starts in on the boy's neck with a clean razor he'd had hidden in his jacket's stitching. Blood spills in little rolls, red and hot, but it's a pretty clean cut that Max presses deep enough that the razor falls straight to the mass of the first, larger tumor. Max presses it halfway through the wound and then plucks the little monster (it doesn't smell like a real monster, but who knows) free with his fingers (shadows of claws for half a moment) when there's finally enough to get a grip on. Not that the slimy thing can be properly gripped.

(little monsters, these demons of the material world, chewy little flesh-renders)

The smaller one is deeper and more difficult. Max goes at it with his teeth (the prominent, curved canines are there even if no one sees) and ends up sucking it out as much as chewing it.

It comes free. He spits blood and bad tissue onto the sand. Trying to wipe the red from his mouth only smears it across his face and arm, so he licks his lips and grimaces at the aftertaste of death.

He hears the distant shriek of a lost Wisp.

The wound leftover barely bleeds, oddly enough. The tumors seemed deeper than that. Or maybe the boy's just dehydrated. That'll do it. So it's not enough blood flow to be worried about. The first few dribbles of red race down to the sand, and then that seems to be the worst of it.

Strange, but then again, it's not as though Max is really all that knowledgeable of how mortals bleed. They die or they don't and he's never quite understood it.

He hauls the boy up onto his shoulders again, and walks.


There is a Wisp stalking about the sands. Sometimes she takes Jessie's face. Sometimes she is a little girl who he thinks he might recognize, but isn't sure. He's known so many humans. It's impossible to remember them all, even if the Wisps can.

They usually get tired of him ignoring them after an hour or so, but this one keeps up with him, flitting about and talking at him. He doesn't listen. But she keeps talking. This one must be particularly lonely, but he knows that if he speaks to her, she will never leave him alone. And he can't bear to look at her when she has on Jessie's face.

It is not as though Jessie is the first love he's lost. He has had wives before her, each one precious to him, each name engraved upon his heart. Partnership with mortals is a brief and strange thing, but his loneliness often draws him back to them. They are bright and beautiful if they care to be, in their short lives. Jessie was like that.

Jessie was unique in that she had borne him a child. Immortals have difficulty reproducing. This is necessary, of course, or else they would overrun the world with their numbers, generation upon generation refusing to die. Or, they would have. Before. When there were enough of them it would have mattered.

But Max hasn't met another Immortal in millennia. The ones like Entity and Humungus, with their little glimmers of Inhumanity, might have bred an Immortal back into the world, because Max knows that can happen, but he hasn't seen any evidence of that.

Jessie's son, his son, would have been immortal. Max would not be alone now, if he had lived.

But he did not live. And Max sees nothing but dust and ruin on the hazy horizon.

He ignores Jessie's Wisp and marches on.

"Where are you, Max?"


At some point, the War Boy wakes up with a jolt and a startled noise, violently coughs up dirt and chrome spittle and half-coagulated blood all over Max's back, then passes out again.

Max looks to see bits of bloody flesh fall to the sand, stringy and yellowed around the edges. The smell is very wrong, a lot like rot and sickness, and Max kicks sand over the mess.

If something like that is coming out of the War Boy's body, there's probably nothing Max can do to save him now. He considers, for a moment, simply letting the boy lay to rest in the sand. There's not much point in carrying around a corpse.

But the War Boy coughs a little more, then takes in a deep, deep breath. And keeps breathing.

Some of the rasp is gone from his lungs.

Hm.

Max keeps walking, War Boy in tow.