A yearning void gnawed at her insides. The scorched earth beneath her feet was warm, but her blood ran cold as ice through her veins. A haze of black smoke wreathed the burnt-out ruins surrounding her, blown-up husks of metal shacks once haphazardly put together to provide rudimentary shelter. Crooked metal bars jutted out of myriad piles of iron rubble, forcing her to move cautiously to avoid their deadly points. Some of them had bodies impaled on them, mangled beyond recognition. She could not gaze upon them for long, lest the sight of it make her puke into her helmet.

Some fires still burned amidst the smoke and shadows, ignited power generators in collapsed homes and incinerated vehicles in the devastated streets. Under the midday sun, the heat was almost unbearable. She felt every inch of fabric stick to her body like glue, felt thick droplets run down her face and into her eyes. At least, she told herself it was sweat that tasted so salty upon her lips. Long ago, she had been told, a great war had ravaged the entire world so badly that, where once there were forests and meadows, there remained now only dustbowls and wastelands. A war so terrible it reduced continental cities to ashes. A war so brutal it almost rendered the race of men extinct. She could not imagine something so harrowing, but as she looked around she thought that it must have been very similar to this. If such a war had indeed happened, then it seemed that the world had learned nothing from it. Nothing at all.

With every step she took, her hopes of finding signs of survivors dimmed. All she found were signs of struggle, craters left by explosions, holes left by bullets, burns left by laser fire. Her people had been driven from their homeland once before, had been forced to flee to lands unknown at great cost. They had not been willing to run a second time, it seemed, and so died on foreign soil. At least some of them did; she could not help but notice that there were not nearly as many bodies as there should be. Dead men were certainly plentiful, as were the loathsome bodies of their mutant enemies, but not enough to account for the entire village. For some reason, the lack of corpses disquieted her more than finding them might have. Her mind told her to remain optimistic, to expect to pick up their trail outside the village and encounter a handful of survivors. But her trembling heart told her to steel herself for a worse outcome.

When she crested the hill upon which the settlement had been constructed, and where the market hub used to be located, she beheld something that forced her knees, made her ball her fists. Her veins felt cold and hot at the same time, her heart felt like a reactor on overdrive. Erected before her, rising above the remnants of merchant stalls, was a great metal pillar with three prongs at the top. From every prong hung a nude body, strung up by the hands, the shoulders dislodged: an elderly woman, a middle-aged woman and, worst of all, a little girl. Each of them had a pitch-black shard of crystallized Ichor rammed through their chest, just above the breasts, and a sickening, inky growth had formed from the rim of the grisly wound. She knew enough about the wandering hordes to recognize the fiendish idol as a shrine dedicated to a three-faced goddess, worshipped among some of them: Maeve, the goddess of change, death and rebirth. It was not the first time she had to witness such a shrine, having encountered others like it in temporary camps, or in the wilds where the mutants had passed. But it was the first time she had to endure the sight of her own mother shackled to one.

Merrill unstrapped and took off her helmet, carefully placing it on the ash-covered ground beside her. The acrid smell of burnt material choked her throat and she succumbed to a coughing fit as her lungs struggled to find clean oxygen amidst the flames and the anger in the air. As she recovered, her eyes travelled upward once more, beholding the emaciated, despoiled body of the woman who had caused her so much grief. She hadn’t spoken to her mother since their arrival near Jericho’s Reach, although she had always planned to one day make up with her. Surely their feelings could have been reconciled one day. One day… a day that, now, would never come. She grit her teeth and folded her fingers around a random piece of debris on the ground.

She rose to her feet, screamed desperately and threw the piece of junk off into nowhere, where it clattered against a burnt façade. “How much more can you take from me?!” she yelled at the ash and flames. “What else?! Was Harlow not enough? Was Mama not enough? Did you fuckers take Daddy too? [b]Did you?![/b]”

Her voice cracked up and she lost herself in uncontrolled sobbing. She was certain that, somewhere, sadistic evil gods were laughing at her plight. Were punishing her for her sin. Whether they be gods of men or beasts, there must be some transcendental entity that was watching her, some kind of intelligence that hated her for what she did. But she did not regret it, nor would she ever. Piss on the gods, if she had to.

After many minutes of agonized crying and screaming, Merrill had recovered enough to climb onto the pillar and cut down the bodies. She could not avoid them plummeting to the earth like sacks of meat, though it was better than to leave them hanging. Later, she straightened their bodies and placed them in as dignified a pose as she could, before arming herself with her rail-gun and obliterating the pillar-like shrine with a single, well-placed shot through the trunk. When she donned the helmet again, her eyes felt sore from the tears and the smoke.

As the evening sun painted the sky a hellish red, she prepared a funeral pyre outside the ruins, atop a smaller hill gazing out across the barren wasteland. All three bodies were placed on it, and she watched them burn long after the flesh was gone, long after the sun had vanished behind the bombed horizon. She watched the embers still when sleep washed over her like a tide.

And in her dreams, she lost them all. Over and over again.

Only blood could heal the poison in her heart now.