The Great War. The Last Of Us

II. The Wheel Keeps Spinning, Spinning, Spinning

The pit is always burning.

     Day and night; summer, winter, fall. It's burning when the sun scorches Boston, it's burning when the wind blows sparks into your eyes. It's burning when you and your children settle into the one bedroom apartment you'd been "blessed" with. The fire only stops when it rains, but even then you'll always smell the ash— and the flesh.

     You lose track of how many bodies get thrown in a day, most people stop counting at six, or when they see a child tossed into the smolder like trash. Boston is stained gray from the pit's constant flames. Marring the once untainted suburban streets. Now the whole place is a graveyard, every building a ghost and every corner is a cemetery for someone. People die every day.

     It was a hard picture to swallow, watching Boston grow more and more bitter and tormented by the sins that it's forced to endure. The QZ is no lawless land, but somehow, having law just makes it worse. People are burned or hung or shot all through the hours. Doesn't matter what you did, all crime, even small, can be punishable by death.

     Mindy Warner had spent enough time stuck behind FEDRA walls to see everything; the good, the bad and the disgusting. She saw what this confinement made people do, she saw how the outbreak drove people to madness; either slowly or in the blink of an eye. The world was cruel now and empty. She knew that beyond those reinforced walls (their glorified pen) there was only death and disease and disappointment.

     She's travelled the state and certain parts of the surrounding ones enough to know no matter where you were; inside or out, you'd never escape the blood. Didn't matter how you did it, why you did it or when. You'd always be stained by what you saw, even if you were lying in a comfortable enough bed or under the millions of stars.

     Mindy hated Boston. She's burn it to the ground and let the infected have at it if she thought it would do her cause any good; or if it would save her sister from the inevitable collapse of her moral compass. But she knew it wouldn't change the course of events; you can't stop the flow of water or force a clock to stop ticking. You either swim with the current or drown in it. She'd chosen to swim.

There was no difference between anything anymore, no matter what Mindy chose; somebody died, somebody didn't and someone got pissed off. A cycle, the reminder that the snake always eats its own tail.

Metal screeched behind her, pulling her darkened gaze from the flaming pit to her superior, her employer of sorts. Marlene led the Boston unit of the Firefly's. A position she'd been given rightfully so. She was brutal, exact and cunning; she reminded the young woman of her sister. The difference was that Marlene moved through this life with little remorse and Kate's guilt was tied to her by the ankles. She wore it like anchors.

"You get enough sight seeing in yet, doc?" Marlene asked jeeringly, her brow arched as she stared at the young doctor. Their best and most proper doctor.

"Can't be sight seeing if you can hardly see it. The smoke's getting thicker every day." Mindy replied evenly, standing up from the crouch she had held. Even from the top of the building her eyes burned from the smoke and the ash. "Do you need me now?"

"Ellie's refusing the other doctor. Called her a pansy ass cunt and threw the lunch tray into her face, cracked the lady's tooth."

The doctor chuckled, fully facing her coworker now. "Maybe it'll do Greta some good. She never seems to understand boundaries." Her hand flexed at her side, just behind where her hammer was hooked into a hip holster, the handle jutting out. It was muscle memory now, to always check for it. She hadn't parted from the blunt weapon in twenty years. The handle which had once been a light brown was forever red now.