A contented, low-pitched whistle echoed in the small, surprisingly clean confines of the third-floor bathroom. The tune was an old, mournful ballad of distance and loss, 500 Miles, but as rendered by the pursed lips of John the Minotaur, it was stripped of all its inherent melancholy and transformed into something jaunty, even triumphant. The source of this musical transgression sat enthroned upon the settlement's greatest marvel: a functional, water-flushed toilet.
John, Captain of Cinder Town's Guard, was an early riser by necessity, not by choice. His morning routine typically commenced a mere ten or fifteen minutes after Old Gimpy's, but their motivations were worlds apart. For Gimpy, the dawn was for purification, a ritual of soap and water. For John, it was for evacuation, a daily engagement in a private, painful war he had long believed was his immutable fate.
The affliction was, to be blunt, haemorrhoids. In the grand, miserable scheme of the Wasteland, it was hardly remarkable. When one's hygiene routine consisted of scraping with irradiated dirt clods, rough leaves, or splintery sticks, such a condition was less an anomaly and more a universal, silent brotherhood of suffering. It was a great unifier; a man withoutthis particular misery was the true outlier. Yet, the brotherhood of shared agony did nothing to lessen the acute, burning torment that accompanied each morning's constitutional. It was a searing, humiliating trial that brought a sheen of involuntary tears to the eyes of even the toughest wastelanders—a fact John, for all his formidable size and strength, would privately admit. Given the choice, he would have preferred a clean knife wound to this persistent, fiery indignity.
He had accepted it as his lot in life, a tax levied by a cruel world for the simple act of existing. Then, an angel had appeared, not with wings, but bearing a small, red-and-yellow tube.
As part of his ongoing, somewhat ruthless experimentation to determine the most effective post-Collapse pharmaceutical, Lord Harry Potter Michael had distributed various remedies for "the backside affliction" among his inner circle. It was a dual-purpose act: human trials and a peculiar form of executive bonus. John, blessed by fortune, had received a 10-gram tube of 'Mayinglong Musk Haemorrhoid Ointment'.
His initial application had been tentative, a mere dab of the mysterious pink cream. The effect was nothing short of miraculous. A wave of cooling, soothing relief, so profound and instantaneous it felt like a physical unknotting of his very soul, had washed over him. The change was so dramatic he had pinched his own thick, furry forearm, suspecting a dream. If it were a dream, he never wanted to wake. The other recipients of different pills or poultices had muttered about the ointment's peculiar, medicinal smell. John had scoffed internally. What was a strange odor compared to the alternative? It was the scent of salvation.
The tube became his most prized possession, more valuable than any weapon. Its worth was tested when Nina, the delicate deer-hybrid attendant he had long admired with a clumsy, hopeful heart, approached him with a proposition. She would consider his courtship, she hinted, in exchange for the remainder of the wondrous cream. The refusal that sprang from John's lips was immediate and absolute, surprising even himself.
There were two reasons. First, the solace the ointment provided was too profound, too tangible to trade for the uncertain currency of romantic possibility. The cool comfort it bestowed was a certainty; a female's affections were a fickle thing. Second, and more decisively, he knew the intended use for which Nina and the other attendants craved it. The very thought made his bovine blood boil. They sought to waste this divine balm, this tool of healing, on their faces! To smear it under their eyes to reduce dark circles or lighten their skin, all in a vain attempt to appeal to their Lord's rumored preference for paler complexions. It was a blasphemous perversion of the ointment's purpose, a desecration. As the Lord himself might say with a weary sigh, it was simply criminal.
Later that morning, under the climbing, merciless eye of the sun, Captain John stood before the newest recruits to Cinder Town's defense. The good mood fostered by his pain-free dawn had curdled into the focused, snarling energy of a drill instructor.
"Straighten that spine, you sagging bag of bones!" he bellowed, his voice a whip-crack across the dusty parade ground—a cleared patch of earth near the main gate. "Chins up! Chests out! Eyes front! You will not move until I say you can move! Is that understood?"
Eighty men, recently scavengers and laborers, now stood trembling in four ragged rows. They were clad in the Lord's standardized uniform: promotional straw hats, brightly colored T-shirts adorned with faded logos for forgotten businesses, garish floral-patterned shorts, and the miraculous, flapping comfort of rubber flip-flops. In their hands, they gripped their primary armament: seven-foot-long spears, their tips painstakingly ground to a sharp point from scavenged rebar.
John stalked the lines, a mountain of muscle and menace. A twitch, a slouch, a wandering eye—any infraction was met with a stinging crack of his training stick across a shoulder or thigh. None dared to flinch too visibly. The privilege of standing here, of eating the guaranteed daily ration, of being part of the Guard, was worth any amount of temporary pain. They all knew the stakes.
The prosperity brought by the well had transformed Cinder Town. The price of water had been slashed to a fifth of its former rate, especially for those who traded in the colorful, pre-Collapse paper currency the Lord seemed to favor. The news had spread across the badlands like a grass fire, and with the influx of genuine traders came a more sinister element. Old Gimpy, with his decades of survival-honed paranoia, had been the first to voice the concern: among the streams of scavengers, there would be spies, scouts for the raider gangs that preyed on success. The town was growing fat, and fat settlements attracted predators.
Hence, the New Guard. Nourished by a month of full bellies and, most importantly, the daily restorative dose of a whole can of Yellow Peach Preserve—a sugary, syrupy ambrosia that seemed to build muscle and spirit overnight—these men were being forged into a proper militia. Their individual fighting skills, honed by a lifetime in the wastes, were not in question. John's task was to hammer them into a single, cohesive unit, to replace the instinct for solo survival with the discipline of collective action.
While the recruits baked and suffered under the sun, the twenty-nine veterans of the Old Guard were engaged in more advanced training nearby. When not on patrol duty, they practiced marksmanship with the settlement's pitifully small arsenal: the three ancient, heavy M1 Garands and a single, battered shotgun. Ammunition was so precious that live-fire exercise was a rare luxury. Instead, they spent hours aiming down the sights, their muscles screaming as they held the barrels steady, often with a heavy brick tied to the muzzle to build strength. Under the watchful eye of Onil, the newly promoted Sergeant, they learned breath control and sight picture. Most had fired a real bullet only once. It was a painfully slow education in a deadly art.
But the spirit was there. A new, fierce sense of ownership burned in their eyes. Cinder Town was no longer just a place to huddle against the dark; it was home. The clean water from the well, the solid food in their bellies, the strange, colorful clothes on their backs—it was a life they had never dared imagine. They were no longer just fighting for survival. They were fighting for this. And if any invader came, they would find not a disorganized rabble, but a wall of sharpened steel and desperate, determined men who had finally found something worth dying for.