Dawn rose over a new Waste day like a lazy teenager ambling out of bed, or a senior citizen who just doesn't give a crap anymore. Light crept along the undulating, barren landscape to illuminate the disaster that it was, and remind all those present that they lived in a nightmare, and no, they hadn't finally died in their sleep. The dust storm from the day before had moved north for a while and then finally given up, and now, all things considered (which they invariably must be in this setting), it was a relatively calm day.

The wind whistled a gentle tune through the shallow hills all around Smack-dab, where numerous bodies - too many for Things to get them in a single night - still lay bloating in the dawn's dewy air. A truck, painted red and covered with armoured plating and nasty spikes, remained dormant next to the scene. Its internal organs - what was left of the patchwork technology that kept it running - were spilled across the landscape, bitten and slashed where biteable and slashable, or just haphazardly discarded where not. Two corpses rotted in metal gun emplacements atop the ancient shipping container attached to this dead vehicle, hidden from the sights of whatever might come to take them in the night. It would be a while before anybody discovered their bodies.

Far away, the last remnants of Farmer Brown's once-mighty horde encountered a scouting party sent to see where they had gotten to. What few had fled from Smack-dab had barely made it through the night, and those that had, wished they hadn't. The survivors tried to explain how their leader - a god of a man, to some - was slain by a tiny, angry woman at a rickety wooden bar, but the scout captain wasn't interested in what he perceived to be their lies. The survivors were all cuffed and taken back to the Farm, to be shot for cowardice. The captain stared at the execution as he eagerly awaited the valiant return of his powerful, undefeatable lord.

To the north, a shadowy figure stumbled into the town of Second Thought. He was covered in blood, dust, and numerous substances that anyone passing by quite instantly knew they didn't want to know more about. His face was contorted in a deadly grimace, a twisted mess of furrowed brow, bared teeth and dark eyes that spoke the word of death (which was just "death" repeated). He limped visibly on a damaged leg, with one boot missing as well as two toes. His coat looked like it had been clawed apart by Things, his trousers shredded with holes, and if the man once had a backpack, he did not anymore. Both of his hands were bandaged stumps, and nobody would ever find out how he managed to bandage them both by himself. Nobody wanted to know more about this man. They tried very specifically to know as little as possible, actually. It was like he had a bubble six feet all around him that nobody wanted to step into, even in some of the more crowded Second Thought markets.

An occasional trader recognised this black figure, and for a second, there was a glimmer of something other than hatred within the man's heart. "Wasn't he the man who single-handedly toppled the Sandcastle?"

"I thought he was the man who quelled the Bank Island riots with only a spoon and a piece of chalk?"

"No, it was a fork and a small rock."

"No you damn fools, it was a knife and two amputated fingers."

"Actually ... it can't be him. That man had two good fingers and a fine set of toes. This guy's just a nobody."

A nobody.

Nobody.

The bloodied man would clench his fists if he could, and the fact that he couldn't made him want to clench all the more. He stared at a store down the street, a single-storey workshop with the sign "Harry's Robo-Limbs in a Hurry" scrawled on the front next to cartoon figures of a happy family all holding robotic hands with one another. He gritted his teeth together and marched for the entrance.

* * *

Bert woke up - so she was off to a good start.

To be more accurate, though, Bert woke up over a period of time. Her brain required a number of run-ups to get fully started. Her various receptors all flickered on limb by limb, and each one came with the disappointed feeling of wanting to go to sleep again. The forever sleep, preferably. It really felt like she needn't have woken up at all, for all the aches and pains. And that was lying still - she couldn't even imagine moving.

But, regardless, wake up she still did.

"Morning, sunshine," said a voice.

She opened her eyes groggily, her heavy lids demanding that they be left alone. Bert was in her bedroom, by the looks of things. Someone had carried her to bed, tucked her in, and - by the looks of a nearby bucket filled with something awful - tried to clean her as well. They hadn't removed her clothing, though. Her pigcow vest was gone, as was her gun belt, but the important covers-the-private-bits accoutrement were still stuck to her skin with blood. The top few buttons of her shirt were undone, but it appeared that whoever had started chickened out at the last minute - which was fine, in Bert's mind.

The room itself was small, designed for function rather than comfort. Bert had a small, hand-made single bed on one side, a squat chest of drawers on the other and a rough desk in the middle, where a leather-bound accounting book sat gathering dust. And sitting next to her on the bed was the smiling figure of Phoenix, all cleaned up and dressed in fresh clothing (or as fresh as clothing can be in the Waste, anyway). He even had his apron on.

"How ya feeling?" he asked, smiling gently at her.

"Bliaehgia" Bert replied, realising her throat was too dry to form real words.

Phoenix quickly grabbed a short glass of liquid (to call it 'water' would be a lie) and held it near Bert's face, where she could sit up slightly and drink it down. She did so, groaning loudly with the pain of movement before forcing her lips onto the tumbler. Bert hadn't really realised how dry and inflamed her throat was until the cool liquid sloshed over it, and it felt like heaven in her mouth. That is, until, she swallowed.

"Throat a little sore, huh?" Phoenix asked, putting the glass back down. "You took a fair walloping yesterday, that's for sure."

Yesterday...

So it had only been one day since Bert passed out. Her thoughts wound lazily back to the day before, to the chaos of the storm, the blood and screams and violence. And Farmer Brown, the monstrosity of a man, the type of man lesser men would make cults out of, and that giant hammer of his.

"Brown...?" she croaked weakly, the images of what happened to him a foggy blur in her memory.

"Oh don't worry about him. We tried burying the corpse, but nobody was strong enough to push him into the hole. Also, nobody wanted to dig a hole. We just left him outside and made sure the floodlights weren't on him. Half the body is already gone."

So, Brown was dead. That made vague sense in her recollection of events, but she couldn't quite put her finger on the details...

"Meatsack is fine, too," Phoenix continued. "He's just out serving drinks. He wouldn't leave your side, but a bunch of bandits are still here so I needed him out there helping me while I cooked. Jeb is helping out, too, while we look after Orsen. Do you remember Jeb and Orsen? I like those guys - they're weird."

Bert frowned. "There are bandits ... inside Smack-dab?"

Phoenix's face froze, then he shuffled noticeably further away from Bert - just out of punch range. "Err, yeah. Um, about that. We felt bad kicking them out, you know? After they helped us and all... Sorry, Bert, I know your stance on bandits in Smack-dab, I just, I couldn't ... you know?"

Bert continued to frown, mulling over the thought. Before yesterday, she would have pinned bandits in Smack-dab as the worst thing that could happen to Smack-dab, at least in her mind. They were like a stubborn weed: Once you let them get into your garden, they just hung about, multiplied, and ruined everything. But yet, for some reason she didn't feel so disgusted by the thought. Her trigger finger didn't even twitch (although, to be fair, she hadn't checked to see if it still worked at all).

"No, it's OK," she said, almost surprised by her own words. "Let them stay for a bit longer, then kick them out. We owe them the grog."

Phoenix nodded and smiled, moving a little closer again.

Bert thought for a moment longer about Farmer Brown and the circumstances surrounding his death. She stared up at Phoenix, into his big eyes, and tried to piece together the utter madness of the day before. Phoenix looked like he was inching closer as she thought.

"Don't you fucking dare," she growled at him.

He cowered backwards. "Damn," he said, "I really thought that one was a proper moment moment. What on account of me saving the day and all yesterday."

"You saved the day?" Bert asked, ignoring the obvious guilt trip that lay in his humble brag. She often wondered if men realised how obvious their deceptions were, or if they were just stupid. ...probably the latter.

"You don't remember?" Phoenix replied, smiling widely. Beaming, you might even call it. "You and Brown were lying on the ground together and when he moved towards you, I shot him in the head."

"Woah, woah, woah," Bert suddenly snapped, glaring up at Phoenix. "Stop right there a moment."

"Stopping here."

"Rewind a second."

"Rewinding..."

"You did what?!"

Phoenix scratched at his scraggly beard. "I ... shot Farmer Brown in the head?"

"Argh! No, Phoenix," Bert wailed, slapping her face with her human hand and holding it there. "Fuuuuuuuuuuck," she growled through her palm.

"Is there, err, something wrong?"

"Do you know how close I was to negotiating peace with that guy? Peace that would have made us rich!"

"Oh, err, um, err, really?" Phoenix grinned nervously and his eyes darted about the room looking anywhere but Bert.

"He was unarmed, lying in the dirt and badly wounded," Bert continued, her face going red. "Why the hell would you shoot him in the head?!"

Phoenix shrunk away to the foot of the bed, a puppy being rebuked for what it thought was an exciting triumph, but turns out was just a shit on the floor. "He wasn't unarmed," he mumbled.

"What do you mean he wasn't unarmed? I axed him in his fucking chest and watched him fall to the dirt."

The chef nodded quickly. "Yeah, sure, but he had a knife stashed away on the other side from you. I was watching, Bert, I swear. He tried to grab it when you were talking, so I blew his head off. Err ... at least I think it was a knife. It could have been something else. But I'm pretty certain it was knife-like, at the very least. Almost a hundred per cent certain. Maybe eighty. But higher than fifty, that's for sure."

Bert stared at him wide-eyed and red-faced. A knife? Bloody hell, why did everything have to be so complicated all the time? First she couldn't believe that Farmer Brown was telling the truth, now she couldn't believe Phoenix was saying he wasn't. Bert seethed, hating the mad farmer for ever having come to Can't Be Buried.

"...Bert?" Phoenix mumbled quietly, gazing at her. He was pale. "Are we, err, you know, umm ... good?"

Bert stared at him for a number of tense seconds, then sighed loudly, allowing herself to be defeated. "Yeah," she finally said, "we're good, I think. Just, I dunno, go clean something. I don't have the energy to yell at you right now."

And as if on cue, a sweaty-faced trader burst into the room, panting loudly from what looked like sheer bloody panic. "Bert, Phoenix!" he cried, voice high-pitched and scared.

Bert frowned at the man. "What's up, Regis?"

Regis babbled for a second, then formed the sentence: "One of the bandit folk went to the toilet and he dun' come out, so's we go to investigate an' there's a bloody huge spider in there!" He held his hands apart to indicate size, at least three feet.

Bert processed this for a moment, then sighed again.

"Phoenix, you wanna take this one?" she asked.

The adventurer looked at her as though she were mad. "Do I have to?"

"Oh yeah, big time."

He mewled sadly and heaved himself off the bed, forcing each step to thud loudly in protest as he trudged towards the door.

"Phoenix," Bert called after him.

He turned.

"Try not to ruin the corpse, alright? We'll serve it as a special today."

...and that was how Smack-dab returned to normal.

More or less.

* * *

And that's it, folks! Stay tuned until after the credits page as there's a post-credits scene coming.

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