The ninety-minute walk to the farm town, and the two-hour wait inside an abandoned post office as Ada and Leon scouted out their targets gave the former quartermaster more than enough time to ponder the stupidity of her participation in a bounty hunt. Her armament was, quite frankly, ill-suited for the task.

One 10mm pistol, N-series. 79 rounds left, all of them 155gr jacketed-hollowpoints. Six 12-round magazines gave her a combat load of 72 rounds—all but seven rounds of her total supply.

One (admittedly rare and well-built) .44 Mag revolver, 39 rounds left out of the forty-two she’d started with two days ago. These too were all hollowpoints, of the 240gr variety. She had to pull three rounds from a speedloader to top off the cylinder, and if what that kiwi-shaded stallion the other day said was true, she couldn’t count on finding .44 Mag anytime soon. She’d have to be careful what she used it on.

One newly acquired 12-gauge shotgun, pump-action, five-round magazine tube, griffon-made judging by the stock and forearm which had no provisions or alterations to allow pony users to manipulate it with their hooves or a battle saddle. A quick inspection last night showed it to be in surprisingly decent shape compared to most of the pistols she’d found so far, with some minor surface pitting on the receiver and finish wear along the barrel. With a handsaw borrowed from Ada she was able to saw off the buttstock at the wrist, leaving the slim, pistol-grip section intact to give her magic something other than the receiver to grasp at (and making it much easier and more comfortable to stow inside the long gun scabbard on her traveling saddle). She only had nine shells for it, though—00 buckshot, nine-pellet load. The 21-inch barrel had a choke tube installed inside the muzzle, but it was a simple improved cylinder choke and sat flush inside the muzzle. A superbly simple front bead sight was the only sighting aid—she’d have preferred a set of rifle-type sights for potential slug use, but she could make do with the bead. She’d had plenty of practice with it years ago, before the Stable’s ammunitions stock ran low enough to make regular target practice impossible.

None of these armaments were of any use against armored barding. Modern armored barding worked much like a net to do its job—it was made of a material that, when woven together into multiple layers, was stronger than steel, and would essentially “catch” the bullet and stop it before it could completely penetrate the barding. The more layers there were, the better they would be at stopping bullets. The downside was that it would be thicker and heavier, and harder to move around in. And blades could still pierce the barding with a straight-in stab without too much trouble. Many souls had tried to improve the concept in the war, even designing new materials in the hope of finding that singular “do-it-all” miracle product that would give both the best protection and the best mobility possible. And while armored barding could stop a bullet from penetrating it, it still left nasty welts and bruises from the impact, and sometimes the blunt force trauma by itself was enough to break bones. It was still better than the more serious and potentially lethal gunshot wound, but nopony liked getting hurt.

Until two days ago she’d thought she was armed well enough, and with proper shot placement that was still the case. But her two gunfights so far had been against ponies she’d been able to get the drop on—the first group didn’t think she had the guts to actually shoot them and gave her all the time she needed to line up her shots on her first kill, while the second group had been caught by surprise long enough to let her kill two of their number by headshots before the last two tackled her to the floor. Her third firefight was not going to go down that way, and she didn’t think she could concentrate well enough to get decent shots at the head under fire. She could do body shots….

….but only if they were unarmored. And aside from those savage raiders, most everypony she’d shot at had armor of some kind that looked thick enough to turn aside a 9mm or .38 Special. A 10mm or .44 Mag might have enough velocity and momentum to truck through, or it might not. And the soft lead pellets of a load of buckshot were most definitely not going to cut it.

Today was going to be no different. Ada had hardly walked two steps into the creaky post office before she dropped the bad news. “Ten souls,” she snapped off softly, her talons dusting off her coat as she spoke. “Three griffons, three unicorns, four earth ponies. Most of ‘em got armor of one sort or another. They must’ve just come back from a raid, had all kinds of loot and bags with ‘em. They went into an old grocery store at the edge of town, and one griffon’s back outside on lookout duty on the roof.”

Sling kept her uncouth curse quiet enough that the only sound that escaped was something akin to “cluck”. “…options? From what I saw that grocery store front covers three streets, and trying to sneak around to the blind spot means going out into the open wasteland. Y’know, where the lookout could spot you if he gets the idea to take a short flight around the block.”

“I can pop him from the water office further into town, three blocks away from the store,” Ada answered as the last puff of dust from her coat sprayed into the air around her. “Leon might be able to bag two more with suppressing fire when the others come out to see what’s going on, but after that it’ll be down to who can hit who first. Plenty of cover in the streets—smashed building walls, old sky wagons and carriages, stuff like that. There’s even a hole in the street running by the grocer deep enough to hide a pony in it. It’ll make for a messy firefight, and you’re not exactly bristling with AP munitions.”

“I figured that part out already,” the unicorn snarled in reply over a howling gust of wind that began to flow past the post office door. “Hitting them where they’re holed up doesn’t sound like the smart way to do this. They’re organized enough to hit caravans, so they probably already have the area around their base scouted out for flanking routes and potential ambush sites.”

“Or booby-traps,” the griffon added, as if wanting to ensure that no potential Bad Thing would go unnoticed or unmentioned. “Found what was left of a dog in the alleys near the store when I was scouting around for a sniping position. Looked like the classic ‘tripwire-grenade’ trap, most of the blast damage was at ground level. Could be more, Leon’s poking around for ‘em right now. We’ll have to be careful when we move in.”

A spark flared to life inside her brain as she sought ways to better the odds they’d face when the time came to fight it out with the bandits. “Maybe we shouldn’t be,” she whispered evilly. “They’d come running to check things out if one went off. We can draw one or two out away from the group—“

“And cut their numbers a little without triggering a shootout right off,” Ada finished with a sick grin. “Won’t work more than once, but it’ll definitely even things out more in our favor. All right then, let’s go find us a bomb.“

Well, at least it’s a plan, she heaved in silent nervousness. “In a minute. Wanna make sure the others don’t freak and bolt out when they hear something they didn’t expect.”

The heavily armed griffon merely grunted and planted herself near the doorway on all fours. “Make it quick.”

Sling had to bite the side of her tongue to keep her retort in her head where it belonged, and quickly trotted towards the back of the post office, behind the counter and into the bedroom-sized mail sorting space—

Light Tail’s head perked up from their resting spot on her forelegs, her eyes betraying her eagerness and hope that she would hear something other than “Mommy’s going to go kill ponies now”.

She wished she could say what her daughter wanted to hear….

“It’s time,” she whispered sadly, and El-Tee’s face wilted until it looked like she’d died on the inside.

“….m-mom…d-do you have to—“

“If we want those collars off Kite and BJ, yes, I do. It’ll be over in about fifteen minutes. You may hear explosions too, not just gunfire. Whatever happens, none of you come out when it’s over. Wait until I tell you it’s safe. If you don’t hear from me or Ada in thirty minut—“

“Don’t,” the little one snapped back sharply, surprising her mother with the sudden fire in her voice. “Don’t talk like that. Just makes the waitin’ worse….”

I’m trying to say it for me, you silly child! “I just don’t want you caught without a plan if the—“

“We’ll be fine,” Kite’s voice injected from the side of the room, her body tucked underneath a table, where a pile of decayed crates hid the majority of her body. “Things won’t get that bad. Just…just get this over with so we can get these stupid collars off.”

She hadn’t expected the freshly freed slave to be the sole voice of confidence amongst the ponies in the room, and it sucked her words out of her mouth and back into the oblivion of her mind. Without another word she clamped her jaws onto the door and pulled it shut, her daughter’s soft, glistening eyes following her face until the door clicked shut, and she hastily rejoined Ada at the doorway before she could give in to the childish urge to smash it open and grab the filly in a terrified hug.

The griffon had, by then, drawn her pistol from its holster on her hind leg, her head carefully peeking out beyond the doorway for a quick scan of the streets. “Other side,” she said, her left talon pointing towards an alley between two buildings across from them—what looked like a flower shop and the caved-in remains of a bakery. “Tread softly, sound carries farther than you think.”

She didn’t need a reminder—she’d not have tracked down that slaver making a beeline for where she’d found Kite and BJ if the idiot had been a little slower getting back to his gang. Still, she didn’t want to be out in the open for longer than she needed to be. With a deep breath and a shake of her tail, she slipped out past the griffon and into the road, not daring to look to either side of her as she traversed to the other side as quietly (and quickly) as she could do so.

She didn’t even hear Ada coming up behind her until the griffon’s talon tapped her withers in a gentle, claw-first poke—

“I’ll take point from here,” the mercenary whispered, slinking past her on three limbs while the fourth clutched her pistol. “Leon’s waiting behind the water office.”

Sling had her 10mm pistol in her magical grasp before the griffon had finished, and for the next few minutes followed along behind her in a backwards walk as they trudged through the alleys. A flick of her tail every ten seconds would brush against one of the griffon’s hind legs and keep her on track, and a couple of times wound up backing up into her backside when the merc had stopped to thoroughly inspect what she thought might have had a bomb or tripwire attached to it.

When Ada stopped for a third time, one of her hind legs shot back and stopped the unicorn in her tracks before she could repeat the mistake. “Find anything, Leo?”

Leon’s voice was quiet, but still managed a slight bestial tone. “Coupla of booby traps in the ruins across the street, just like we thought. Hand grenade with a tripwire, won’t be hard to disarm ‘em.“

A piece of brick broke off from its parent and tumbled onto the cracked pavement of the alley, and Sling’s eyes traced its fall to the ground, its impact mixing with the whistling breeze. “Leave one intact, stable pony here has a better idea.”

“Does she?”

“Yeah, set one off, it may draw a couple of ‘em out to see what’s going on,” Ada answered coldly. “Take her with ya while I set up the shot, she can trip the grenade without exposing herself. Take out whoever comes sniffing around, quietly, then give me the signal to take the shot. Use the other grenade to start off the ambush when the rest come running. We gotta put the griffons down first, or this contract’ll go south on us.”

A brief tingle of terror shot through her muscles at the thought of having to get close to a live explosive trap with the intention of actually setting it off, but she kept her misgivings to herself…mostly. “L-lovely,” she stuttered, but quickly set her focus on her mouth to keep from sounding like a bumbling idiot. “I would be crazy enough to set off a bomb on purpose.”

Ada had a short, snorting laugh at her expense as she drew away from Sling’s tail and saw herself into the building beside them, through its back door. “I thought you were just crazy. Just remember to breathe before you start shooting, and aim for the head or their front legs. Use that shotgun, the distance you’ll be shooting at should get a good, tight spread out of it.”

“Only got nine shells for it,” she shot back in protest, but to little avail.

“Then don’t miss.”

Another curse left her snout, silently, as she slinked off down the alley in Leon’s wake. It took most of her concentration to keep her slight trembling from getting worse as they snuck through the alleys, and at one point inadvertently dinged her PipBuck against a drainage pipe still hanging onto a building by a few rusted screws. She cringed at the impact, but the sound didn’t carry terribly far, and Leon didn’t even stop to scold her for the break in noise discipline. She stole a moment to check the casing for damage—

—and cursed herself for her shortsightedness as she suddenly remembered that she hadn’t even bothered to turn the EFS function back on since she’d left the Stable.

You bucking idiot, you have combat advantages built right into your leg and you don’t even think to use them! Her magic hurriedly began to twist and grab at the switches and dials surrounding the monochrome green display. Within seconds a familiar, faint green directional overlay began to form at the bottom of her vision, showing a large N off to the left and an E on the right end atop large, bold hash marks, with various sized smaller hash marks in-between the letters. And while Leon and Ada didn’t have PipBucks, the E.F.S. matrix still registered their life signs and displayed their general locations with small green triangles along the directional overlay—Leon’s was right at the center, while Ada’s was smaller in size and situated a few hash marks over to the left to indicate that she was somewhere behind them.

And for added measure, she went ahead and booted up the S.A.T.S. matrix as well. A pair of letters—“AP”, as in Arcane Power, she assumed—popped up in the lower right corner of her vision, and a green bar slowly began to fill up in a leftward path as the spell gathered the energy needed to function. She spent the remainder of the trek going back over the basics of its use and principles—she hadn’t touched the feature ever since her shooting had started to drill two-inch groups with handguns at twenty-five yards three years back. She’d always considered S.A.T.S. something of a crutch—it was usually easier and faster for her to just use the iron sights and target manually rather than fiddle with a built-in spell matrix to take over the shooting. But in a world where ammo supply was inconsistent at best, the spell matrix was suddenly starting to make better sense.

And it would make landing headshots on armored savages a lot easier….

By the time the S.A.T.S. bar stopped filling up, they had reached their intended destination—a congested collection of small, one and two-floor buildings in various stages of disrepair, stretching far enough across that they were shielded from the view of the griffon perched atop the roof of the grocery store across the street. Her E.F.S. had by then filled with ten red hash marks overlaid onto the left half of the compass….

…and two smaller green triangles were mixed in with them.

“Hold up,” she whispered over the griffon’s shoulders as he stopped just in front of a trash can and slowly laid himself out on the ground. “Two unknowns in there somewhere.”

“How the hell would you know th—“ Leon snarled back in response, cutting himself off mid-sentence as the answer dawned on him. “….oh, right. That fancy PipBuck. Didn’t know you’d turned it on.”

“I try not to depend on it,” she replied, turning around for a few seconds to check behind them. Even if the E.F.S. wasn’t showing anything, she wasn’t going to trust it completely. “Just wish it would tell me the difference between a pony, a griffon, or an animal.”

“Most likely animal,” he said with a slight grunt, pulling a small multi-tool knife from his duster and flicking out what appeared to be a wire-cutter tool. “That dog we mentioned we found blown to bits? It was a female, one probably nursing a litter of puppies. Wouldn’t surprise me if the griffons in that raiding party took them for meat. The body’s a couple days old, wouldn’t be more than one or two pups left by now. Might explain those unknown tags you’re seeing.”

If Light Tail had been here to hear this, she would have been heartbroken. One reason she clung to that white fox plush so much was that she’d always wanted a dog or a puppy, but until two days ago all she’d known of them was what she’d learned from the library. She was probably still under the impression that most animal life up here had died out….

….wait, what? Dog?

“…hey, wait, you mean like….A dog? A normal one, like in Equestria That Was? No mutations, no hideous-looking…sacs of something growing out of its skin? Just like….a normal looking dog that barks?”

“Yup,” Leon affirmed, without bothering to complain or wonder aloud why she’d ask such a question. “One of the few animals that didn’t get changed by all the radiation and…and whatever it was that the zebra’s balefire bombs released when they blew. Cats too, but since most of their prey’s mutated into carnivores themselves they don’t do too well hunting anymore. Some of the sheep in the ranches out west kinda…regressed, I think. Heard rumors that before the war, the sheep flocks up north could talk like us. Thought that might’ve been true down here too, but either it was all bullshit or they just seemed to lose that intelligence in the decades after the blasts. They don’t talk, ain’t near as smart as us either. They sorta just graze most of the morning on what little grass they can find, and spend the rest of the day chewing cud. All they’re good for now is meat and wool.”

Her heart skipped several beats as old memories of the Stable came flooding back to her, now tinged with horror as untold implications of radiation exposure began to attach themselves to the memories. “….imagine that. Talking sheep.”

A soft click! popped into the air, accompanied by a quiet sigh of relief from the griffon’s throat as he stowed the multi-tool and began to reach around the trash can. “Ahhh, there we go. The other one’s at the other end of the alley. You can see straight around the corner to the front door of that grocery store from there.”

She could already see three potential hiding spaces between their current position and the other trip-wire booby trap—an industrial dumpster, a pile of old, rotted wooden crates collected against the wall on their right, and an open back door into the building on their left near the end of the alley. “Got a spare knife? Never thought to pack one when I left home.”

The griffon’s answer was to pull what looked like a field survival knife from the back of his armored barding underneath his duster coat and held its grip out towards her. Her magic wrapped around it and pulled it in for a better look, and a part of her hindquarters cringed at the sight of the sharp, jagged teeth along the back of the blade. The cutting edge of the blade itself looked fairly new, though, something she didn’t expect to see on the surface.

“I’ll hide inside the shop up ahead,” he said, his eyes locked onto the open doorway. “You duck behind the dumpster right by the door. Quick and silent, we’ll need to take them both out at the same time or they’ll give us away sooner than we want.”

“Then sit still for a second,” Sling returned evenly, concentrating her magic into a second spell and feeling the familiar touch of her hearing protection ward envelop her hearing. “You can’t hear them coming if your ears are ringing from an explosion six feet away from you.”

Reading a stupid book while her mom went off to shoot and kill seemed….well, stupid.

For one thing, those bad ponies could catch them by surprise if she was so focused on reading that she didn’t pay attention to anything else around her. Secondly, she was pretty sure BJ would just give her a hard time over reading a book to take her mind off the blood her mom was about to spill.

And thirdly, to sit there, reading an epic fantasy book in relative comfort while her mom was shooting at other ponies and risking being shot herself….it seemed wrong. Insulting. Like she would be saying that she was so unconcerned for her mom’s well-being that she could just kick back and relax. So she left the book in her saddlebags against the wall, and contented herself with just watching and listening for any sign of flesh-eating bugs, or bad ponies and griffons that wanted to hurt her.

And she really couldn’t concentrate on distracting herself when she was worried sick that her mom wouldn’t come back. Her erratic, heavy breathing as she quietly paced about the storage room helped her a little bit, but it seemed to get on Kite and BJ’s nerves, because in just three laps around the center of the room the colt decided to come out from under the table he was hiding under and get into her walking path.

“Cut that out,” BJ demanded quietly.

I don’t remember Mom leaving you in charge, El-Tee thought with a slight bitterness. “I’m being quiet enough—“

“There’s things out that hear better than we do,” he continued, cutting her off before she could dismiss his presence entirely. “Death claws, bloat sprites—“

Her worries over her mother only intensified at the mention of the grotesque names for creatures she hadn’t even seen or heard of….but with names like “death claw” and “bloat sprite”, it wasn’t hard to figure out that they weren’t looking for cuddles and companionship. “….w-what’s a death claw?”

“It’s this really big, ugly lizard that walks on two legs, has these two huge limbs that griffons call arms, or something, and they got really sharp claws the size of yer head and—“

“BJ, stop scaring the poor thing,” Kite admonished her colt when it became clear that he took more pleasure out of the question than was probably appropriate. “….look, it’s nothing to be worried about, nopony’s even seen a death claw ‘round these parts for months—“

“That don’t mean there won’t be,” El-Tee shot back with a slight shudder just trying to imagine what a death claw might look like. “And I’d rather know what’s out there from you guys than finding out when we run into the things. We won’t last a month out here if we keep walkin’ around blind, we barely got away from that….that yao-thingy the first hour we were out of the stable.”

“Yao-gaui,” the scarred mare corrected gently with a resigned sigh, her body finally turning over until she was upright with her forelegs tucked together in front of her. “….how’d you get away from one of those? They don’t stop chasing a meal once they find it.”

She tried—without much effort—not to remember that blur of a memory. All she could recall right off was that it looked like a big, hungry bear suffering from a very bad case of mange, that it had chased her and Mom up into an upstairs bedroom, and that Mom had tied something around the bed and made her go with her out the window and—

“….I don’t know,” she answered, her eyes losing their focus on BJ as she tried to will the images out of her mind. “Ask my mom, I really don’t wanna think about it.”

“I will,” Kite promised softly. “….but as far as death claws go, they haven’t been seen all that often. Only saw a couple last year, and we were far enough away that they ignored us. Bloatsprites are what became of the parasprites after the war, when the radiation from all the megaspells and whatever the zebras used got to changing everything they touched. They’re really disgusting to look at, got these spines along their backs that they can shoot at you, and they’re really hard to hit unless you got a PipBuck or a shotgun. But as long as you don’t get close to them, they’ll leave you alone. You ask me, you need to be worried about all the radhogs.”

A shiver slide through the filly’s spine and into her four legs, her brain already tracing together scattered bits of information to arrive at a seemingly outlandish conclusion. Well….it would have been outlandish last week, when all she worried about was falling asleep at her school desk. Today? Totally possible. “Lemme guess….mutated from pigs…”

“Pretty much. They’re much nastier and meaner than old world pigs, though. They’ll charge you on sight, and they have a pretty mean bite, it’ll go through your leg like an old pipe stem. Kill ‘em on sight, they’ll do you the same way if you let ‘em.”

“So what about this union of ponies?” she asked next. If they were going to be talking about the dangers of this “wasteland”, she wanted to know more about which group of ponies to be friends with and which ones to hide from. “The slavers? How does it all work?”

Kite’s steady, neutral face began to grow visibly uncomfortable with the direction this little talk was going, her eyes beginning to glaze slightly as she sought to find a way out of explaining it all. “….l-let’s not talk about that….”

Oh Luna, you’re as bad as Mom. “I don’t wanna hear ‘bout how you were treated, I already know it ain’t pleasant. I just wanna know how they make the whole thing work. How they keep track of who’s a slave and who ain’t. How ponies keep from bein’ made slaves, or how they get out of it. You knew who to look for when we came into town lookin’ for somebody that could get those exploding collars off, so I know somethin’s goin’ on behind the slavers’ back that they don’t like.”

“Don’t fight it, Mom,” BJ quipped up next, surprising the filly with his unusual support of her efforts. “She has a brain, and she actually uses it. Just answer her questions ‘fore she starts going off like she did yesterday and brings every raider in town down on us.”

She had something fairly nice to say to him until he said that, and she felt her ears flattening in disdain. “Gee, thanks….”

“Hey, it’s what I’m here for—“

And that was when it happened, just like Mom said it would. It sounded oddly….subdued, like the sound of thunder from that awesome rainstorm she got to see the other night, but she guessed that was because there were walls and distance between her and the explosion. But it didn’t rumble and crackle like the thunder did—rather, it started off with a sharp boom, and then gradually echoed into a faint whisper. It didn’t shake windows or thump into her chest with the sound, but she was certain it would’ve if she were closer to it.

And those bad ponies that Ada and Leon were after were probably a lot closer to it. They’d come running out to see what it was. And they’d get slaughtered.

….did….did Mom do that just to get them out where they could shoot them?

The last bits of asphalt and brick had just clacked back onto the ground from their physics-induced flight when she heard what sounded like two males shouting and cursing as they emerged from the ruined grocery store across the street.

“Shit, again?! Better not be another damned dog—“

“I’d rather it be a dog than some dumbass wanderer walking through the wastes. Dog meat’s tastier.”

The chance appearance of one of the three griffons they needed to take out was overshadowed by the dawning horror that this raider had likely eaten a pony before to be able to compare the two tastes, and a small, gaping hole inside her chest seemed to open up and take her oxygen with every breath she took. O-oh Luna…

The hoof/footsteps quickly gained a condensed quality to their echoes as they grew closer, likely from the walls of the buildings around them, and in short order they became crystal clear thuds as they rounded the corner and skidded to a stop right in front of the doorway….

….and just around the dumpster she was squished up against….

“….whoa, wait a tic, what’s going on here?” one of the male voices demanded of the empty space around him. “There’s nothing here.”

“Oh for fu—I told you not to pull the pin that far out—“

A quick pair of metallic clicks from inside the building—Leon’s talons tapping against the blade of his knife—sprung the mare into action far more quickly than she would have thought possible. She zipped out from behind the dumpster, her magic flaring to life and bringing her borrowed knife upward for an impending stab into her unaware target—

—an earth pony stallion, covered in armored barding all the way up to his neck, was staring in wide-eyed terror at the griffon bursting out through the open doorway he’d neglected to even look into, barely a second before Leon’s large, saw-toothed silvery blade sank into his skull between his eyes with a loin-flinching crunch of bone and….

She pushed the gut-wrenching sound aside and swung her knife upward, towards the poor stallion’s black-feathered griffon partner, and caught the pony-eating savage right in the throat as he tried to bring a rust-coated revolver up for a clean shot. The blade must have severed the spinal cord from the neck down, as her victim collapsed soundlessly onto the moist concrete beneath them in an instant—

The stallion tipped over onto his side, onto his saddle-mounted long arm, and in the process must have triggered the firing mechanism linkage between the saddle and the firing bit, because a single gunshot roared into the tight confines of the alley. If not for the hearing protection spell, the sound might very well have ruptured an eardrum. Even so, the sharpness of the report left a slight dinging echo in her ears, but thankfully the bullet buried itself into the wall inside of ricocheting off and careening out of control all around them.

Within a couple of seconds of the shot, a second, more distant shot erupted from the streets roughly three hundred yards back, and Sling leapt over the bodies of the savages and around the corner—

—a faded red metal sign sat plastered over a pair of windowless double-pane doors, large enough to accommodate entire groups of ponies entering or leaving, and the words, “Slate Rock’s Grocer” were almost as pale as the sign itself. A second black-feathered griffon had collapsed on top of the sign, and what looked like a droplet of blood began to seep out from his head as he hung listlessly over the edge, his rifle clattering onto the sidewalk at ground level without going off.

She had perhaps five seconds to find cover before the rest of them burst out the front door looking for whoever had dared to come after them.

She broke into a hard run down the alley, feeling a brief rush of exhilaration as she burst out into the open air once more and eying what looked to be a smashed pull wagon made entirely of metal, with age-hardened rubber tires crunched in at odd slanted angles beneath it that suggested that something heavy had landed on top of it at some point in the last two hundred years. She’d hardly found safety behind it when she heard the grocer doors slap open from the rush of souls rushing out—

“—nd ‘em and gut ‘em alive!” a female voice shrieked angrily, a primal, animal-like growl inflecting every word with malice and savagery. “I’ve had enough of this shit—“

A bright, flashing green triangle popped up in the corner of her vision to her left, quickly tracing its way upward as she jerked her head up towards whatever it was pointing at—

—a single grenade, shaped like a pineapple and stippled with small squares across the surface, arced over the wagon and into the crowd of red hash marks in front of her. It clacked across the pavement for only a moment before it exploded, tearing chunks of asphalt out and sending them in seemingly random directions as the savages howled in pain from the shrapnel assaulting their bodies. A second distant gunshot rang out, but with all of the screaming going on she couldn’t tell if it had any effect.

Six sets of legs began bounding for cover anywhere they could find it—behind ancient mail boxes or sky wagons, piles of spilled rubble, anything that could stop a bullet was good enough. She popped out from behind her own cover, her shotgun floating out in front of her and settling the bead sight on the closest target she could find—

—a purple spike-maned, cherry-red coated earth pony mare was hobbling straight towards her with several ragged, bleeding wounds in her hind legs hindering her efforts. She didn’t seem to realize that Sling had already chosen this particular wagon for her own use until it was too late, and the bead had barely swung into place over the spike-haired mare’s face before she squeezed the trigger. The boom drowned out the sound of her body hitting the ground as her magic shucked the forearm in a furious tug to chamber the next shell—

—a quick burst of automatic fire from her left caused her to duck back behind the wagon, the bullets banging into the weathered metal. She shot her eyes back towards the alley she’d come from, to try and warn Leon to stay back before he got cut down—

—the griffon was stalking forward on his hind legs, upright, with his wings slightly unfurled to help balance his awkward-looking approach as he shouldered his .45 submachine gun and its heavy 50-round drum magazine and began to let loose with controlled bursts of three to five rounds apiece—

“Oh shit, runners!!” one of the savages roared to his surviving comrades. “Get back inside—“

A sharper, louder gunshot further down the street cut off his warning abruptly—and permanently—and when Sling stole a glance down the street she spotted Ada roughly a hundred yards away, doing much the same thing as Leon. Walking upright on her hind legs and using her wings to balance herself, with her M-series rifle shouldered and blaring off single, precise shots at her targets as she swung from one target to another—

—not wanting to have to face these raiders inside an old grocery store where stocking aisles would create two dozen ambush possibilities, Sling swallowed hard and stood back up, raising her shotgun out in front of her and scanning for targets—

—she saw three ponies hurriedly trying to dash back through the grocer’s front door from their previous positions off to her left, but one was cut down with a series of shots to his pale yellow-coated legs and head. Two bodies lying just in front of the small crater created by the grenade had fallen atop each other in a tangled mass of limbs and wings—one gray-feathered griffon, and one pale lime pony, both with head wounds that likely reached deep into their brains, and the griffon’s armor seemed to have been pierced by multiple pieces of shrapnel as well—

—She unconsciously brought up the S.A.T.S. targeting matrix on the remaining two living savages as they made their run to safety inside the store, the sound of steady bursts of automatic fire from Leon’s weapon making it a tad harder to concentrate on the rapidly bouncing overlays of green percentage numbers and the lines they were tracing towards various body parts. Limbs had an average of 56% hit probability, body shots were much higher but not worth taking when they were wearing body armor—

—She settled for the legs and mentally commanded the spell matrix to cue up two shots, one on each pony, targeting the front legs, and then executed the sequenced shots—

—she felt her spell field around the shotgun suddenly surging with power as the S.A.T.S. briefly augmented her telekinesis, the shotgun snapping over the rear savage’s front legs and letting off a shot faster than she could have done it on her own before slamming the forearm back and forth and chambering another shell. She barely saw the impact on his legs—at roughly fifteen yards away the buckshot would have started to spread apart by the time it reached him—but enough of the pellets found important things to tear up that he was considerably slowed, and was made much easier for Ada and Leon to tear apart with their own focused fire. Ada’s rifle had little trouble ripping through his armored barding, while Leon settled for a short burst of four rounds that traced up the side of his neck and head. It was difficult to tell whose rounds had ultimately killed him.

Her shotgun had already zipped over to the lead pony by the time the next shell had been slammed into the chamber, a unicorn mare decked in full-body barding, sporting dual 9mm pistols in her telekinetic hold and a stockless submachine gun dangling from a strap around her neck. The bolt barely had time to click back into battery before the gun roared again, but this time the charge of buckshot managed to miss with most of its nine pellets. Only two found purchase inside her right unprotected foreleg, but didn’t hit anything vital enough to slow her down. A single round from Ada’s rifle popped her along the back of her armored barding, but also had little effect on her as she finally made it inside the grocer, escaping a furious string of rounds from Leon’s .45 Auto subgun as it peppered the wall around the doors and zipped through the empty panes of the doors themselves.

And only then did she begin to realize just how quickly this entire sequence had gone down. She counted two shots from her shotgun in under two seconds….

Leon’s body slammed into the wagon right beside her, startling her so badly that she jumped and spun in place until she’d landed on her belly—

“Wow, I cannot believe that,” he muttered in disbelief. “She actually missed. Hey, Ada, did you drink any Sparkle-Cola in the last ten minutes?!”

“Up yours!!” the female griffon roared back angrily as she quickly took flight and zipped towards them in a low-gliding drop. “She must’ve had an armored plate over her spine, that was a solid hit!”

“We can still take her out if we’re careful—“

The savage mare must not have gone too terribly far from the door, because her frantic, terrified shouting reached out to them the moment the two griffons began debating her final fate. “N-n-no, w-wait!! I g-give up, I don’t want n-nothin’ ta do with this!! Don’t shoot me—“

“Tell that to the forty souls you wiped out over the last month, bitch!” Ada screamed back, her voice dripping with anger as she touched down onto the street, standing upright, with her rifle aimed at the doorway—

—the savage crept out slowly and steadily, tossing her three guns aside as she emerged straight into Ada’s sights, her bright blue eyes glistening with tears. “I-I was with the first caravan they raided!!” the mare screamed back, her voice beginning to crack as she tried to plead for non-existent mercy. “I w-was the only one they took alive!! I’ve been their plaything for weeks—“

“Sweet dreams,” was all that Ada cared to say, her cold tone telling them all they needed to know about what was about to happen.

And the savage mare knew it. “O-o-o-h nooo—“

“—nt you to do this, this isn’t you!! You’re not a murderer, so STOP IT—“

Sling’s magic dropped the shotgun into the wagon’s interior, her daughter’s teary-eyed pleading echoing back to her as she shifted her spell over onto Ada’s rifle and grabbed hold of the trigger just as the griffon’s claw squeezed back, keeping it from moving even a millimeter.

The griffon didn’t even look to see which of the two unicorn ponies had just blocked her shot. “You’d better let go of that trigger, stable pony.”

“Wait!” Sling shot back, focusing her attention on the savage trembling in the grocery doorway. “You! Start talking, which caravan?!”

“S-Sunny Side’s caravan!!” the savage cried, her legs giving out beneath her. The name meant nothing to Sling, but she hoped it meant something to Leon or Ada. “F-from Stifla! I’m f-from Syrup Mound!! She s-stopped into town, lost two guards to a slaver raid a month ago, was lookin’ for new hires!! I s-signed on, we got hit ten miles north of here when we set out two days later!! Th….they killed everybody…”

Sling’s heart began to grow heavy with each passing beat, taking in the quivering, terrified mare in a slightly different light. None of the savage ponies she’d met had acted like this. She didn’t think they were even capable of faking this kind of fear.

She did think they were capable of letting their victims live long enough to….to “play” with them….

Ada’s firm resistance to her spell field began to soften, no longer pressing against it in a vain attempt to squeeze the trigger, but Sling was not willing to release her hold on it just yet.

“….I tried hiding in the bodies,” the mare continued to cry, her eyes becoming lost between her stark terror and the memories she was forcing herself to relive for the sake of coming out of this mess alive. “…but they found me….they kept me alive. Made me do things….with them….to them…..all of them. They used me, beat me….forced themselves on me….I-I cracked, I told them I’d j-join them. It seemed like the only way to make it stop…”

She felt the rifle begin to slip through the spell field, dipping low and slackening until it was no longer aimed at the tortured soul before them.

“…t-they let me come with them this morning. They got w-word about a caravan coming to the Mound, somehow….they hit it exactly where they hit Sunny’s….they wanted t-to take another mare…j-j-just like they took me…”

Her telekinesis spell died entirely, her bones growing numb as the poor thing’s sob story began to take a dark, vile turn. Ada didn’t even seem to notice.

“….I killed her….shot her in the head, so they couldn’t take her, and do to her what they’d done to me….and they laughed. They took everything, and we came back. And I finally remembered her when we came back, I knew her….she was…we used to scavenge the city ruins, until the Union restricted access to that part of the city….and I think she recognized me, too….”

The tortured soul ran out of things to sob and scream, and started to cry and shake where she lay in wordless gasps and howls….

….and Sling couldn’t bear to let her go on like that anymore.

She didn’t even feel herself moving, she was so numb to her own motions. She could see herself pulling the poor thing up off the ground and leading her away from the grocery store, thought she felt herself cringing as the mare flinched under the touch of her magic. She could hear herself trying to soothe her panicked psyche as she found a secluded, debilitated attorney’s office across the street and barged into the receptionist’s lobby, trying to tell her that she wasn’t being taken away to be executed in a dark corner or taken advantage of. She could almost feel her magic straining to pull the mare’s armored barding off when her nose picked up an all-too-familiar stench that reminded her of Light Tail’s days as a newborn foal. She could almost taste the water she was splashing the mare with to clean her up like said foal, tossing aside the torn, used rag when she was done and never intending to use it again.

But all she could truly feel as the trembling, crying cream-coated mare within her hug began to howl into her chest, was how utterly inadequate and foolish she was to think that she had serious problems. So what if her stable called her a slut and shunned her from their midst? That wasn’t suffering. That was nothing. There were souls up here, suffering far worse and on a far larger scale, with little or no hope that it would ever stop, and that nopony would come to save them from the horrors others were willing to inflict on them. She was ashamed to think there was a time she thought she had it bad in life. Even more ashamed that she had to have a living survivor cry it out to her before it finally sank in.

So she sat there, the way El-Tee had been sitting in similar places for her, and let this victim of the wasteland cry and scream herself to sleep in the grasp of a pony that meant to be better than that.

She’d never even noticed that her E.F.S. had changed this mare’s red hash mark into a friendly marker until she carefully lifted the sleeping pony up and carried her back outside in search of a better napping spot.

“Her name’s Cinnamon Roll,” Ada’s voice spoke softly, sparing only a short glance at the sleeping pony in the jury-rigged, stained-blanket padded wagon they’d patched together over the last hour. “Her father runs a caravan company in Syrup Mound, came to us a week ago. Said his daughter had disappeared when a gang of bandits had taken up a home in this little town a little over a month back, and he was pretty sure she’d been killed by now. He told us he’d pay us a thousand caps to take ‘em out if we brought back proof of her fate. There’s this stretch of the old highway a few miles north of here where a bunch of sky wagons fell outta the sky during the megaspell blitz, just like that field outside the one-one-five. Perfect place for an ambush. Four caravans been lost there in the last month. Sunny Side’s was the first.”

Sling had to cover her snout with a foreleg to suppress the shocked gasp that nearly squeaked out, instead of the question she wanted to ask….

“….how can ponies do these things?” she said with a hoarse voice. “What black magic changes a soul to something so vile and evil that it turns them into wild animals straight out of the Everfree Forest of old?”

“The same black magic that told your ancestors that building weapons of mass destruction specifically to use on cities full of non-combatants was the morally right thing to do.”

…shit, I shouldn’t have said anything. “….these….these savages, if I didn’t know any better I’d say they were straight out of a horror story—“

“They’re not stories,” Ada cut her off sharply, her gaze fixed on the horizon outside the town towards Syrup Mound.

Sling Shot could only swallow her pride and wait for the truth she’d already pieced together.

“They’re not like anybody else you’ll run into. Slavers just abuse you ‘till they get you sold off, bandits just rob and kill you, but raiders…it’s like they stared out at the edge of the wastes, saw oblivion in the beyond and went mad. If they catch you, they’ll rape you to death or until you slit your own throat, cut you into pieces for the meat on your bones, sew your coat and flesh into their clothing, and decorate their lairs with your entrails. And if you’re very, very lucky, they’ll do it in that order. Cinnamon was beyond lucky to go as long as she did without them peeling her meat off in front of her eyes.”

Now it was Sling’s turn to shiver and tremble where she stood. That was one hell of a definition of “lucky”.

The twenty seconds of horrific silence were broken up with Leon’s presence as he waltzed into their field of view and began to load the wagon with the spoils of battle he’d spent the last hour sorting through.

“Anyways, we’ll be heading back to Syrup Mound in a bit,” Ada huffed nervously, tugging her boonie hat down until it nearly covered her eyes. “Kite isn’t finding much in the clinic, so whatever she does find is yours. Most of the ammo was for rifles and pistols. We’re keeping a share of the 9-mil for us, but we got no use for the 10mms, .38s and. 357s so that’s all yours. 12-gauge shells too, they had a decent stock of buckshot and about twenty slugs. Three hundred and eighty rounds all put together. Guns are up for grabs, within reason. You want any of the rifles?”

“Never was any good with one,” Sling mumbled back absently. “Wouldn’t mind a couple of those pistols to break down for spare parts.”

“Hrm. Oughta find you one of those 5.56mm revolvers, at least. You’ll want something to punch through armored barding with.”

The talk of weapons and ammo was starting to take up slightly more mental energy to focus on…and Sling quickly found that if she focused on it, she wasn’t thinking about Cinnamon’s horrors. “….know where I could find one?”

“Not as common as they used to be, spare parts are starting to dry up. So they’re expensive as hell, six to seven hundred caps and up for one that’s got a working motorized cylinder, never mind whether it shoots straight or not. You might find one in a stable not far from here, though. It’s about fifteen miles northwest of here, surrounded by ant nests, which is why nobody’s thought to go back to it. If you can find a way inside without those things pulling you apart limb from limb, you may find one there. That’s where most of them came from when that stable opened up eighty years ago.”

The way Ada spoke of these ants, she didn’t think they were going to be of the kind that ponies once squished under their hooves without even a thought. “….ants….”

“Yeah, ants,” the griffon sighed. “They can be mean bastards, some of ‘em are almost as big as a brahmin. The worker drones don’t bother you unless you shoot at them, but the soldiers spend their day looking for threats or food to tear up and bring back to the nest. The reason they haven’t overrun the prairie is ‘cause they don’t seem to lay millions of eggs anymore, and the Union’s patrols do a decent job at keeping their numbers thinned out. At most you’ll find a few dozen per nest. But there’s several out around that stable, and there’s nothing else out there that anybody wants to bother with, so they don’t go out there.”

“….what’s a brahmin?” she asked next, afraid the answer would be one that would twist her childhood school memories into a sick joke.

She was rewarded, at the least, with the truth. BJ had been content to simply come up quietly behind them and pulling along a heavy, grunting beast with him, but had apparently been listening to their conversation long enough to feel a need to inject himself and his blunt sense of humor into the mix.

“This is a brahmin,” he said through the rope between his teeth, her gaze freezing at the sight of the horrific, two-headed….cow he had in tow. Its rust-brown colored hide didn’t have any hair on it to speak of, and its udder was grossly bloated from what she was used to seeing on a female cow. “Smelly things, but they pull carts and wagons good. Makes for good hide for barding, and meat for griffons too. And believe it or not, their milk is the least radiation-tainted drink you can find outside a town with a working water talisman.”

Sling merely nodded in horror and watched the colt lead the mutant cow to the front of the wagon, where he began to strap it into the pulling harness it would call home for the next two hours.

“When Kite gets back, I’ll pick those collars off,” Ada said next, her talons digging at a pouch attached to her camouflaged barding which Sling assumed to contain the tools necessary for the delicate work ahead of her. “Think your kid’s still in the grocery, might want to see what’s grabbed her attention for the last hour.”

I’ve got a pretty good idea, she didn’t say as she wordlessly trotted away from the wagon, whisking herself inside the store in a matter of seconds.

The place had likely been picked clean as the megaspells dropped—its shelves were bare, with only the occasional scattering of trash and broken milk bottles to suggest that anything of value had ever been there to start with. Rows of checkout aisles mocked her with their silent testimony to better, more bountiful times, and their cashier’s registers had been smashed open long ago, but whether Equestrian bits still had any value now was dubious at best. Perhaps as a collector’s item and not as actual currency. The lights above her had all burned out or burst long before her grandmother had even been born.

And yet, somewhere in the far corner in the back of the store, was something that had managed to keep her daughter squirreled away inside for most of the last hour.

What had her little Daring Do found now?

She pushed past the haunting echoes of times past she swore she was hearing as she trotted through the aisles, jumping over a counter in the left corner of the store that had likely at one time displayed fresh produce from the farmlands surrounding the town—

—Light Tail’s voice began to creep from the slight crack in the door to a room behind the counter, which according to the plate next to the door was a supervisor’s office—

“—t’s okay, no mean griffon’s gonna eat you now—“

She nudged the door open with a tap of her snout, slipping through with a slightly disheartened sigh that didn’t even register with the filly. Had she already found what was left of the others?

“….no, they’re not,” she agreed solemnly as she drew closer to El-Tee’s spot in the corner of the room, next to a desk with a barely-working terminal, and the shivering bundles of whimpering, whining fur trapped in her little forelegs. A pair of husky puppies, their gray and white coats giving little room for error as to what breed they were, and their wolf-like appearance belying the fear they felt at all the strangers coming and going around them. Where was mom, they were probably wondering right now….

Light Tail’s slightly damp face had run out of tears to shed for the moment, and settled for letting the puppies nuzzle her as they tried to get their mother to come to them with their cries. “….it’s got to be real bad up here, for folk to want puppies for a snack….”

“Very bad,” she said, settling down beside her night light and resting her shotgun up against the desk nearby. “I wish we’d stayed in the stable—“

“Don’t say that,” El-Tee snapped back with a sniffle, a hoof reaching out to corral one of the puppies back to her when it managed to wiggle free from her. “You said it yourself, we coulda died in there if we’d stayed. And bad as it is up here, there’s still some good if you look for it. Ada, Kite, Blue Star, Leon….even BJ….and then there’s these little guys….Ada said somethin’ bout a dog bein’ blown up earlier, when she came back to get you….I guess that’d be their mom….”

“Probably.” No use sugarcoating what the squirt already knew, even if she wished for her mother to say otherwise.

The other puppy began to squeal and howl, since it’s earlier cries had gone unheeded, and Light Tail couldn’t help but nuzzle it to try and calm it down. “….and then that mare you found…you guys didn’t shoot her. She didn’t look anything like a bad pony….”

“….she could have turned out that way, if we hadn’t shown up when we did. She’s had a very, very hard time these last few weeks. As hard as Kite and BJ…or worse. It’s so hard to tell. And I don’t know that I want to make the distinction. It’s all so wrong, what they’ve been through. It makes me feel…I’m ashamed. That I thought I had it so bad all these years, when things going on above us were so much worse than half the ponies I lived with calling me an immoral slut behind my back. I had it easy. They’d trade places me with in an instant to have the problems I did. And they were nothing compared to what everypony’s suffering up here.”

“…they still hurt you,” El-Tee quipped, amidst the scratching of a puppy’s ear with a forehoof. Or a tiny telekinesis spell, she wasn’t really looking. “Maybe not physically, or to the point where you wished you were dead…but they still hurt you, on the inside. That ain’t any less wrong than what’s goin’ on up here. Just…the wrongs up here, are the ones that make you go mad.”

A tear began to streak down Sling’s face. In a matter of two days and three gunfights, her little girl had already begun to grow up, changed by all the death and horrors she’d seen and heard.

It wasn’t fair. None of it was.

“This wasteland….it’ll eat you alive, if you let it. It’s already eating you when you kill bad ponies and griffons, when we find things like…like this. We gotta find a home, a safe one. Someplace where all this…is just a nightmare you wake up from, and the stable can keep on living. We can’t tell everypony back home to settle up here.”

“….honey, our ancestors burned the whole world,” she croaked, three more tears rolling from her eyes as she draped a foreleg around her in a tight hug. “There may not be such a place anymore.”

“There has to be,” the filly insisted strongly, sniffling back her own tears as she sought to keep the puppies in her grasp calm and safely in her reach. “Somewhere up north, maybe. Cloudsdale, Vanhoover, even the Crystal Empire…somewhere out there has to be safe. This can’t be all there is. The windigoes that pushed the tribes to Equestria woulda destroyed everything in an endless winter by now if it was.”

“That’s just an old legend, honey.”

“Ever think there might be somethin’ to it? That Celestia had a thousand years of peace and harmony through luck alone? We used to be better than this. And somewhere out there, ponies still are. Somewhere that nopony’s talkin’ about, or we’d have heard about it already. We gotta find it.”

She came close. So very close to just….breaking. Telling her that the Stable was gone, that everypony she’d known and loved had choked to death while they skedaddled out the tunnel of rock and into hell. That they would have to find a way to make it up here, or get past this stupid valley to the west where this stupid Merchant Union didn’t seem to have a reach yet. That this was their world now, and that they would have to find a way to live with it.

And at the last second, she switched the subject entirely.

“Got any names for ‘em yet?” she whispered through her daughter’s mane. Oh dear Luna, please forgive me for this one day…

“….not many,” Light Tail heaved heavily, finally allowing the puppies free reign to escape her grasp if they felt like it. And to both ponies’ surprise, they didn’t stray very far, maybe no more than a few feet. But they continued to cry and whine for their departed mother as they fought between going back to the filly’s warm body or risking a few extra feet of distance in the hopes that they’d find what they were looking for. “I was pretty sure you were gonna tell me we couldn’t keep ‘em, ‘cause they’d be a drain on our food and water. It’s gonna be hard enough to stretch it with Kite and BJ with us….”

Sling didn’t care. She might have if Ada had aimed a little higher and blown the back of Cinnamon’s head in before she could get to begging for her life, or if she’d thought to shoot her in the head herself with her shotgun in S.A.T.S. mode, or….or any number of things. But after that, after what Cinnamon had blubbered out in sobs, and messing herself up in fear of the death they’d tried to inflict on her….she didn’t care. Let the little puppies have a share of their rations every day. Wasn’t their fault that their mom had wandered into a booby trap set by sick-souled, evil beings. The least they could do to make their existence up here better was to give them some kinder company. Even if they only managed to live for a few more weeks, or months, it would be better than the fate they were facing this morning.

“…..we’ll find a way. They’re a few weeks old, at the least. Probably capable of eating solid foods now. We may have to kill other animals to get them meat, our rations were meant for ponies. Water’s going to be the bigger problem.”

“….head on back to Syrup Mound, then?” Light Tail suggested, as one of the puppies gingerly returned to her and rubbed her outstretched foreleg with its cheek. “Plenty of water there, if we can afford to stay in that hotel room for a bit. Could be a market for food, too.”

Yes, she agreed almost immediately. Let’s get the hell out of here.

“We’ll be moving that way soon. Soon as Ada gets those collars off Kite and BJ. Did…did BJ want one of these guys?”

“Big jerk told me to leave ‘em,” the filly spat in disgust, pulling away from her mother’s grasp as she finally stood up and began to stretch her legs out for a long walk. “Just for that, he’s gonna have to help clean up after ‘em when they use the bathroom on the floor or somethin’.”

Already thinking that far ahead about what having a pet entails? I knew you were smart. “Speaking of which, might want to find out what they are. Girl, or boy. Can’t name ‘em ‘till you know that, y’know.”

“…..yeah, um…I kinda figured that out already when they ran to the corner over there and…relieved themselves. So I got a couple names in mind. Un-ponylike names.”

“Nothing wrong with that. What are we calling them?”

Light Tail seemed almost proud to announce the newest members of their traveling entourage as Sling finally rose up from the floor herself and collected her shotgun from its nesting place against the desk. “Well, this one right in front of me’s a boy, so his name is Max. And his sister up there? Her name’s Mona now. And if they’re the husky breed that I remember readin’ about in the stable, they’re gonna eat us outta house and home by the time they’re all grown up.”

The names didn’t exactly roll off her tongue with any natural flair, but it wouldn’t take long to get used to them. Didn’t take her long to get used to her second nickname, after all.

It wasn’t hard to keep Max and Mona in tow—they seemed to think that Light Tail was the next safest thing they could be close to, since their mother wasn’t answering their howls and cries. In fact, they wound up nearly being stepped on more than once because they kept darting in between her legs to hide beneath her. They still whined and whimpered, but at least they’d stopped howling and crying for the moment.

She took her time going back into the streets as she did a quick search of the store for anything she and Ada might have missed earlier. In a few minutes’ time she was satisfied that everything of worth had been found and finally led them back to the front door, though she noticed that Light Tail couldn’t help but let her eyes linger on the cashier’s registers as they passed by them. She could understand why—they’d always had enough food in the stable, but it was all grown in the agri levels and had to be rationed out carefully to keep everypony fed and healthy without running out. The idea that there were once stores that did nothing but sell food to any soul with the bits….there would’ve been more than enough for all of Equestria. Enough of it that folk could go out and buy something extraneous as a snack or treat without worrying that they’d go hungry.

She couldn’t imagine such a thing happening in her lifetime.

She pushed the grocery doors aside with a soft bump, and the filly quickly trotted through the open doorway for fear the doors would swing back in and smack her in the face. But it turned out that the hinges were so old and rusted that the doors stayed open and refused to swing back in place, allowing the filly and two puppies to scamper by and catch up to her.

They found Ada sitting next to an old wagon they’d dragged out of a small storage shed another block down the road and fixed up, with Kite furiously scrubbing at her collar-free neck with a glassy-eyed stare of relief as she finally got to scratch at itches that had been bothering her with impunity. A strange-looking mark on the other side of her neck, however, refused to be rubbed off no matter how hard she tried, and after a few seconds she gave up on it entirely. BJ was crouched down in front of the griffon on all fours as she carefully picked away at the locking mechanism with two tiny, thin metal tools.

By the time they reached the wagon, she heard a distinctive, metal clink! as the collar popped open, and BJ seemed almost surprised by the sudden release of pressure upon his neck.

“There we go,” Ada sighed with relief. “Be free, little dude.”

The colt carefully slid the displaced collar off and gingerly laid it down in front of the griffon before hoofing it at full speed back towards his mother—and stopped cold as he spotted the two puppies hiding under her daughter’s chest and belly. “….oh crap, you’re keeping them...”

“Yeah, and?” El-Tee cackled as Ada packed her tools away and casually plucked the exploding collars off the cracked-up asphalt as if they were mere rags.

“And I told you to leave ‘em. They’re noisy, clingy, and get underhoof everywhere you go.”

“Sounds like a certain little colt I know,” Kite snapped off, causing him to flinch in place and stop complaining…and that was when Light Tail noticed that he had the same kind of mark on his neck that his mom had. “…wasn’t much in the clinic. Just a couple of healing potions, a radaway, and some first aid supplies, and I had to turn the place inside out to find them.”

“Wasn’t much in the way of medical supplies in the store or on the raiders, either,” Leon grunted from behind as he lifted up something heavy off the ground, filled with what sounded like either loose bits or bullets jingling about inside. “Guess it was a little silly to expect there’d be anything left to steal after two centuries, no telling how many hundreds of thousands of souls have passed through here getting the same idea.”

“Speaking of ideas,” Mom blurted out, coming to a stop six feet away from the wagon, and Light Tail stopped in tandem along with her. The pups kept going only for the second and a half it took them to realize that their moving shelter wasn’t sheltering them anymore, and then they darted back to within two inches of her. “Before we dropped these savages, one of them called you ‘runners’. I’ve heard that once before, when I followed one of Saurus’s minions all the way to him. Said he had no idea who’d killed that gang I ran into, but thought he’d seen a couple of runners in the vicinity. Sounded scared about it, too. Exactly what are you guys?”

“Well, it’s about time you asked, you silly filly!” Ada laughed, her body shuffling in place as she shifted the weight of her two rifles about into a more comfortable position along her back. “We’re with a group west of the valley, the Prairie Runners. We’re the leanest, meanest sons of bitches in the plains.”

They had to wait until they got back to Syrup Mound before they could get any clear explanations out of the griffons—Ada had taken it upon herself to fly ahead of them and keep an eye out for more bad ponies and griffons, and Leon wasn’t interested in talking “on the job”. And even then, it took a while for things to get sorted out.

That poor, tortured mare that they found had a dad, who was so insanely happy to see her come back to him alive that he cried and told Mom that her hotel stay in town was on his tab for as long as they stayed, and didn’t even say anything about the shotgun pellets they had to pull out of his daughter’s leg. So they didn’t have to worry about finding someplace where they could sleep safely, even if the bed sheets and blankets were really old and stained and patched up several times over. And the mattresses weren’t much better—she was surprised they were even still there after all these decades. She’d have thought they’d been worn out into ragged pieces.

Then there was all the stuff that Mom, Ada, and Leon had found off the dead bad ponies and in the grocery store. Guns, bullets, foodstuffs, old work junk, a few books, a couple of crates of booze, and little ponyskull-and-crossbones marked boxes with stuff inside that Ada called chems. There was some argument about what was going to happen to it all, but eventually it got worked out, and they spent the entire afternoon selling most of the stuff to any merchant that was willing to buy it. By the time the meager daylight started to fade from the cloud-obscured sky, they’d wound up with a grand total of around twelve hundred caps, in addition to the thousand-plus caps apiece that the tortured mare’s dad had paid out to Mom, Ada, and Leon for bringing her to back to him. Split three ways, the spoils of their looting from the dead garnered them four hundred caps each.

Their first splurge was another tasty dinner at the bar, at the same table they’d ate at yesterday minus the awesome sarsaparilla bottles, and it was accompanied by a decent explanation of just what was what around here.

And it all started with the first question out of Mom’s mouth. “What are Prairie Runners?”

“Prairie Runners are basically mercenaries,” Ada gulped through a beakful of…of whatever meat it was she’d ordered or not ordered, because the waitress pony just brought something out on a plate without Ada ever asking for it. “We’re scouts, trackers, fighters, survivalists, and whatever else we need to be to make a living. But we got standards. We don’t do slavery or chems. We don’t raid and steal, and we don’t kill anybody if we think it’s for a bad reason like say…a jealous ex-spouse or some merchant baron wanting to wipe out a competitor’s business, or a bandit gang chief wanting extra muscle for a hit on a town or a caravan. Other than that, we’re up for whatever. Usually we get paid to protect towns, scout out the ruined cities and towns for any old world tech still lying around, or guard trade caravans heading out east from our side of the valley, but now and then we get slaver gangs coming over and hitting a few towns for fresh “product”….”

Ada spat that last word out with disgust (or maybe it was the piece of bone she’d inadvertently bit off, ‘cause it landed on the floor beside her). “That’s when we freelance and do whatever we think we ought to so that they don’t do it twice. And that’s how Leon and I got here. Saurus’s gang hit three towns in two weeks a few miles south of Withercha, beat it all the way past the valley and through Trotpeka before we even figured out where he’d gone off to. We got sent to find him, and put him down.”

“And it’s taken you over half a year to find him?” Kite mumbled amidst a healthy crunch of what looked like fresh, chilled lettuce. A delicacy in the wasteland, she figured. And a mystery. Where was this kind of fresh, normal food coming from? “Slavers don’t exactly work in subtle ways.”

“This one does,” the griffon replied, her talons turning her hunk of meat over to begin feasting on the uneaten half. “He’s from our side of the prairie, knows enough of how we operate that he’s careful to not poke his head up any longer than he has to. He makes a run at a town or caravan, gets his captures sold off, and bunkers down within three days. Sometimes he doesn’t even do that, just pays raiders and highway gangs to do the work for him. So long as a decent cut of the sales come back to him he don’t care how they do it.”

Sparks of thought began to clash together inside the filly’s head (and her hindquarters when Max brushed up against her for a more comfortable napping spot and wound up zapping her with a static spark). It was starting to sound as though this valley in the prairie formed some sort of informal barrier, or a border….

“Why do you call it ‘your side’ of the prairie?” she asked, after a quick sip of her glass of unsweet tea that Mom had brewed up with a pot of clean water from the kitchen and a couple of tea bags from their rations. Kite’s eyes were still misty with tears of pleasure from just tasting her own glass of the stuff, and she’d barely drunk a fourth of it so far. “We’re all tryin’ to make it out here, why not work together?”

“That question calls for a history lesson,” Leon answered swiftly, smacking his beak clean of dark sauce or grease from his latest bite of his cooked meat slab. “The Merchant Union started up a little over thirty years ago, mostly just a bunch of caravan owners looking to pool their resources to protect their trade routes better and make more caps. Somewhere along the way they got to settling down in a town northeast of here called Stifla, made it a permanent alliance and conglomerate—“

“What’s a congla….congl….whatever that word is?” Stupid brain, quit stumbling over big words, you’re supposed to know better—

“It basically means that all the smaller groups turned into one big one.”

“….ah.”

Leon’s beak tore another chunk of meat off and began to chew it apart, leaving Ada to continue the story. “A couple of years after they set up a permanent HQ, they finally found a way into the old Equestrian military base that sits out in the middle of nowhere, northeast of here about fifty miles out or so. Fort Wiley’s got the biggest collection of guns, ammo, and military-grade armor in the prairie, and the Merchant Union’s got complete control of it. Even figured out how to get the defense turrets running again. From there, their power really got to expanding. They started hiring and sending out armed patrols of guards to find and wipe out highway gangs, raiders, and anybody that so much as crossed their eyes at their assets. And a couple of the stables around Stifla had opened up a few years before the Union got started, and they knew enough about farming to get some crops going. But even two centuries after the war there isn’t a lot of ground that’s suitable for growing much of anything. And since the Union didn’t want to deplete its numbers to work the few crop fields they had, they turned to slaves. A single company of troops armed to the teeth with automatic weapons can keep all the Union’s farms in constant production, under the direction of stable-trained and educated supervisors. That leaves the rest of their forces free to expand the Union’s trade reach, and they use part of their food surplus as a commodity.”

Light Tail’s stomach began to grow sour from the food in her stomach and what was left of it on her plate, suddenly beginning to realize that maybe this good-tasting food was there because a bunch of mean-spirited ponies enslaved other ponies to grow it for them. Mom’s face likewise began to see her dinner in a somewhat darker light.

“….expand by force, or lopsided trade agreements?” Mom asked somberly.

“A mix of both. But about ten years back, they started outright claiming towns for themselves. They got the biggest guns, and more of them than anyone else, and they seemed to figure out that they didn’t necessarily have to go into fragile trade agreements to make money when they could just conquer a town and take a portion of caps as a “tax” from residents and merchants alike. They went as far out as Trotpeka, took it over and started sending companies across the valley to scout out potential acquisitions. Then they ran into us.”

….uh-oh….

“We’d been sending scouts out across the valley for years before they came over, saw what they were doing there, and we didn’t want them doing the same thing to us or any of the towns on our side. That started the first war in the prairie since the Last Day.”

Now Light Tail’s appetite waned into near-oblivion, stunned by the freely-spoken word of “war”.

Had no one learned anything from the last one?

The short silence gave Ada enough time to munch on her dinner a bit longer before continuing. “A good deal of the early fighting was around the valley. We’d set up ambushes at the only passable routes, and any Union patrol or caravan that tried to cross, we wasted to the last pony. A few months into the war, some of those caravans started turning into counter-ambushes and got a few of us killed, so we switched up and took the fight across the valley, into their territory, and that’s where the really nasty stuff happened. Union troops are organized well enough, but they operate in large groups and they’re too compartmentalized to move or operate too freely without orders from somebody higher up in the command chain. We’re more like guerrilla fighters, we move in small groups, we hit hard and fast, and we don’t stick around in any one place for long. Some of the towns they’d claimed started fighting back against Union control, and we’d train them the best we could. We’d funnel in weapons, med supplies, ammo, whatever they needed to fight effectively. We didn’t have the numbers to fight them head on, but for a while it looked like we could keep them tied up in a constant chase across their side of the prairie trying to hunt us down. We even got word of Union-wide orders to kill any Prairie Runner on sight, anytime, anywhere.”

For a while….bad news, coming our way, Light Tail murmured silently, her right forehoof softly stroking a sleeping Mona at her other side.

“Then we got stupid. All our successes gave us the idea to hit the biggest and largest group of Union troops at a camp near Basin Ridge, just ten miles south of Stifla. Had to work our way around Fort Wiley to get there without being spotted, but we thought if we could at least displace the line of troops they were using to guard the capitol town of their territory, it’d make them more eager to negotiate an end to their expansion on terms of our choosing, not theirs. We gathered up as many guerrilla cells as we could, and made our play….and we lost.”

“It was a trap, wasn’t it?” Mom inferred aloud, to which Ada agreed with a slightly bitter nod.

“Big one. Most of our cells were wiped out after we completed our initial objectives. The seventeen of us that survived had to fight our way back out into the basin where we’d staged our blocking force. We managed to fight ‘em off to a standstill, even with the reinforcements they got from Fort Wiley, but with most of our guerrilla cells gone, we couldn’t keep up the hit-and-run tactics in ten places at once like we used to. They stopped trying to cross the valley afterward, but that one battle solidified their hold on this side of the prairie since they’d wiped out most of the resistance to their rule. We walked right into it...”

This seemed to be a sore spot for Ada, because she stopped talking about it and went back to her food for a bit, and Leon got to pick up the tale again as by then he’d managed to devour the majority of his meat.

Maybe she’d even been at this battle….

“We did manage to get a negotiation with them,” he said. “Just not the one we wanted. Met on the one bridge connecting Trotpeka to the western side of the valley. They wanted at least some trade access to the western half of the prairie, and they were willing to call off the war if we’d let them send caravans now and then across the bridge. With most of our fighting force in the east gone, we didn’t see any other way of keeping their grunts on their side of the valley. So we said yes. That was about seven years ago. Ended the Unification War, with partial results for both sides. Think the Union came out far more ahead in the end, though. Now they’ve got a presence in every town in the Prairie.”

“Trotpeka’s grown into a trade port since,” Ada added after a particularly hard swallow of chewed meat. “It’s the one Union-authorized access point across the valley, and our side of the prairie has things they can’t get as easily here. Gun parts, munitions manufacture, a decent stock of unmutated livestock and meat for the griffons here, and a couple of intact medical facilities that can still make healing potions and first aid supplies. Even got an optics factory that makes riflescopes by hoof and claw. Slow to make, but well worth the two thousand caps for a ten-power scope with no scratches on the lens. Still trying to get me one for my .308…”

“….so if you two fought against the Merchant Union, how is it that they’re even allowing you to be here?” Mom asked next, before gingerly dipping back down to her plate for a nibble at her fried potato sticks. Must’ve been really hungry to not care that it was probably made from potatoes grown by slave labor….

“They rescinded their kill-on-sight order, not that they ever could follow through on it in the first place. They still don’t like us, and if they think we’re hitting their registered slaver companies they’ll come after us anyway. We’re only getting away with hunting Saurus ‘cause he’s not registered with the main slave trade office in Stifla, otherwise we’d be in big trouble. And since he’s not registered, he can’t ask them for protection either, he’s gotta take care of that on his own. Slaves are a different matter, they’re considered protected product no matter who brings ‘em in. Kite and BJ might not be wearing collars, but the marks on their necks signals who the last slaver company to own and sell them was. Without registration papers you won’t be able to move around too freely without risking trouble with the Union patrols. I saw you talk your way past the first one, but I know the stallion in charge of that particular squad and he’s the rare inept type. You won’t get that lucky again, I guarantee it.”

I knew there was some kinda system to the whole thing! the filly snarled in her head as she took back to her meal, intent on at least finishing it off instead of enjoying it. Food was food, and it was better to eat it and stay strong than let it go to waste and get weaker later. Crud, maybe we were better off with the collars….even with the bombs in ‘em….

“Some scarves or bandannas should cover up the marks, at least at a glance,” Mom suggested quietly. They might’ve been the only ones in their corner of the bar, but they weren’t taking any chances of somepony hearing them on the other end. “….but no, that might not work either, Union patrol would just check underneath to be sure. Dammit, those collars might’ve actually been useful—“

“No, please,” Kite begged almost immediately with a startled gasp. “I-I’d rather take my chances, please don’t make me wear that thing again…”

“If it were just you at risk I wouldn’t, but I got myself and my daughter to worry about too—“

“Mom, don’t,” El-Tee butted in before she could finish. “She said no. Don’t force it on her. You might as well be asking her to be a slave again if you’re gonna do that.”

“….kid, you keep this up, I’m gonna start thinkin’ you’re the brains of the group,” Ada said with a devious smile. “You’re right, Union patrol will check yer necks no matter what. But they’ve been cutting back on their rounds lately, sticking to the main highways, and they aren’t at the main town entrances like they usually are. Think it might have something to do with the massive radroach sightings around Stifla, they may have pulled most of their troops to clean ‘em out and keep their crop fields safe. Once that’s done with though, you can bet on seeing a patrol on every road you set hoof on. It may be weeks, but they’ll be back in force. If those two don’t get out of their territory by then, they probably never will.”

“How?” Mom huffed angrily, a forehoof slamming the table out of frustration. “You said it yourself, the only way across is through Trotpeka—“

“I said the only Union authorized way was through there. There’s other routes through the valley, most of them within thirty miles of the city. They’re dangerous ones, and not just ‘cause of those psychotic raiders. The megaspells and zebra weapons didn’t change just the wildlife. They changed ponies too. Those unlucky enough to survive the radiation exposure of the blasts turned into…into something else. They look dead and rotting, only they’re not. And some of them…they went cannibal. Full-out mindless cannibals, and they’ve taken up parts of the valley around the city. We call ‘em ghouls. The sane ones are nice enough, but a little sore at us “fleshies”. They can’t survive without regular exposure to radiation, it seems to heal them. The cannibal ghouls….it’s not pretty. You’d have to be crazy to want to go through there…or know a safe route.”

El-Tee caught the mischievous glint in the griffon’s eye as she said that. “A safe route that you guys would know about.”

Ada’s amused chuckle brought back slivers of hope to the filly. “…yeah, you’re definitely the brains. I’ll give you two routes, in case you end up having to turn back from using one of them. But don’t use it more than once. They’re our only way back into the east side of the prairie unnoticed if we end up in another war and we don’t want the Union finding them. And I think you guys will like it better on the other side anyway, very few slavers, no big group of heavily armed ponies telling you what to do or what you can have, and raiders have a hard time popping up for more than a week without getting shot to pieces. Food and water’s not grown by slave labor, it’s worked by ponies willing to do it. It ain’t as much as what the Union can grow, but it’s honestly grown. Over there, you can make your own way through life. Over here, part of what you make goes to the Union whether you like it or not.”

“This that recruitment thing you kept asking me to take up yesterday?” Mom shot back with a sneer of suspicion.

Ada’s smile only grew wider as she laughed. “My sales pitch that obvious, stable pony?”

“We should check it out.”

Of course she wants to chat it up five minutes before bedtime, Sling groaned to herself as she spat the last of her mouthwash into the sink of the restroom attached to their hotel room. Another short stream of lukewarm, clean water from the working faucet washed her mouth clean of the remaining residue. “We’re not walking through a valley filled with radiation-mutated cannibals. I don’t care how promising those safe routes Ada gave us are.”

Max and Mona began to whimper at how much the ceramic tiled floor of the restroom amplified her voice, disturbing their brief entry into slumberland, and they began to struggle to get on their feet and stumble their way closer to her—

“No, no, sit,” she commanded of the sleepy pups sternly, cementing her desires with a firm push back onto El-Tee’s barely-worn stable suit, which still had enough of her scent to it that it seemed to keep them calm whenever she was out of their sight. “Stay. I mean it.”

Max—she could tell it was the male by his slightly larger size compared to his sister—refused her command and simply nuzzled her foreleg as she pushed it against him, but Mona seemed resigned to her fate of a night in the dark without the presence of another soul aside from her littermate.

“I said stay!” she tried again, louder and with slightly more force in both voice and hoof, and this time Max took the hint and stumbled back onto the stable suit. But he wasn’t happy about it and continued to whine quietly as she backed out of the restroom.

“Good boy. Stay.”

His eyes pleaded with her to reconsider as she shut the door, but thankfully he didn’t resort to barking and howling to change her mind. He probably thought Light Tail would do it for him.

He would come to find out just how foolish a notion that would be.

“I still think it’s worth at least a look,” the filly continued to press, now that the puppies were more or less corralled. “We’ll never get across the valley through Trotpeka if those stupid union ponies are watching for runaway slaves. And even if the other side is no better than this one, it’s still the only way to get to the Equestria Core. The old highway through to the north ran from Withercha, remember? That was how the prairie kept in touch with Equestria That Was.”

She remembered her Equestria history class from her school days very well. She also remembered that not one soul had so much as mentioned that highway or any of those cities in the Equestria Core in the three days they’d been out of the stable. “El-Tee, not one soul has even said anything about them. Whether they survived, or tried to send help, or if they even keep in contact with them. Equestria That Was could have been turned into a radioactive lake in the megaspell exchange for all we know.”

“We won’t find out for sure until we try. We talked about this already! There’s gotta be somewhere safe away from all this!”

“I’m willing to take my chances on the other side of the valley, but not by going through it! There’s gotta be an old bridge or something nobody’s ever found—“

“If there was a bridge we coulda used Ada would’ve mentioned it. Either those union ponies got them, they blew them up, or they got blown up in the war. We can’t jus—“

Outsiders were beginning to display an incredibly nasty habit of interrupting her arguments with her daughter at just the right (or wrong?) moments. A simple creak of the centuries-old door connecting their room to Kite and BJ’s was sharp enough to catch their attention, and a slightly sleepy-eyed, grape-coated mare sauntered through with a slightly irate glare for each of them.

“By Luna’s moon, can you two stop fighting for just five minutes?” Kite seethed quietly. “Some of us want to sleep today.”

Another silent, uncouth swear formed on Sling’s lips, though no sound ever gave it enough life to be heard. “….sorry,” she squeaked sheepishly. “Just….trying to figure out where to go from here.”

“Can it wait ‘till morning?” Kite begged, her voice suggesting that this would be the heavily preferred option. “The prairie’s not going anywhere.”

“I’ll wait if you’ll tell us if anypony’s ever heard from Canterlot or any of the cities up north,” Light Tail countered sweetly with an innocent-eyed gleam in her eyes. “That’s where we wanna go eventually.”

Kite’s eyes darkened and fell in on themselves. “….don’t bother. There’s no way to get there.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Because I used to live on the west side of the prairie when I was your age, little one,” the scarred former slave croaked sadly. “That old mountain path into the Equestria Core? It’s a nightmare, a no mare’s land. Just a big open wound of flesh-stripping sandstorms and broken land where there used to be life. Not one living soul has ever come out of it in the two hundred years since the war ended. If there’s anything left on the other side of the pass, we’re cut off from it."