//------------------------------// // Chapter 2: The First Step // Story: Fallout: Equestria - Unburied // by BlueNinja //------------------------------// Dulcimer climbed the rickety stairs, emerging on the roof of the former Royal Equestrian Arms building, looking around. Sure enough, Rubble was laying on her back, staring up at the gray clouds filling the sky, hints of orange and yellow beginning to bleed into the sky from the east. “Didn’t think you’d be up here,” Dulcimer said. “I thought maybe I should try and get used to the great outdoors. Sitting up here and staring at the horizon is almost dizzying.” She rolled back onto her hooves and walked slowly to one crumbling rooftop edge. “It’s like you can see straight out into eternity if you stare hard enough.” Dulcimer looked out towards the east, where the world slowly lit up under the filtered sunlight, her mind fighting to find the familiar walls. She stumbled, her balance gone, and squeezed her eyes tightly closed. “Yeah, sure. I’m not sure I want to get used to it.” “Me neither,” Rubble admitted. “Celestia, I was such a stupid kid two days ago. Oh yeah, adventures in the great outdoors, zebra terror agents and mutant monsters, super weapons and magic spells and heroism.” She spat over the edge. “Hey, two days ago it was just entertainment. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Focusing hard on the cracked cement, Dulcimer stood up the walked back to the stairs down. “Sparks should be up any minute. Are we ready to go?” Nodding, the earth pony joined her, picking their way down the stairs to the ground floor and the makeshift security post. They greeted a grumpy Mai Tai and stopped at the top of the metal stairs, hearing someone tromping their way up. “Morning, kids,” Cinder Block said, setting down a saddlebag. “I brought you some more supplies and ammunition, along with some trade goods people volunteered.” Sparks peeked out from behind him, laboriously setting down his own bag. “Divvy it up between you, and be careful out there.” “We will, dad,” Rubble said, giving him a hug with hooves that only trembled a little bit. Dulcimer gave him a hug too, taking half of Sparks’ supplies into her own bags. “So, where should we go first?” Cinder turned on his PipBuck, transferring them a map file. “According to Brass, the trading caravans have all come from somewhere south of Fillydelphia. The city itself is still basically an uninhabitable irradiated ruin, but somewhere between Filly and Baltimare is something of civilization. Calls itself the Confederacy. Head there first. Hopefully, you can negotiate with them to send guards to help us move.” Sparks looked at the map. “That’s over two hundred miles away!” Cinder looked away, staring out a gap in the wall towards the smoky column where the bodies of the dead fanatics still smoldered. “You have a better idea, I’m all ears.” The unicorn winced, ears flattening against his skull. “Yeah, me neither. Even with everything we have, we can’t turn this town into a fort, not forever. We need more friends than just the villagers up here in Roam.” “Go out into the giant, irradiated wilderness, and make friends,” Rubble said. “Sure, no problem.” “That’s the spirit, my girl.” He tousled her mane and grinned. “If you run into trouble, or there’s something else you need, come on back. Just remember, we’re counting on you.” “Maybe if we’re lucky, you can find us a new Stable door,” Mai Tai muttered from her side of the barricade. “Alright dad. We won’t let you down.” Rubble shrugged on the large saddlebag over her battle saddle, checked her bayonet, and turned towards the front doors of the building. “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred,” she muttered under her breath. Sparks tsked. “Can we keep the melancholy to a minimum? We haven’t even gotten half a mile away from home yet.” They strode through the crumbling remains of downtown, stopping frequently to stare into collapsed storefronts, peer into toppled trashcans, and generally investigate the ruin of what had been their grandparents’ home. As the urban center gave way to the houses and parks of the suburbs, pre-war architecture was even rarer. The survivors had torn down whatever couldn’t be fixed, torn up the once manicured lawns to plant their struggling gardens and orchards. Houses, in pairs or trios, sat surrounded by makeshift walls put together piece by piece out of crashed sky carriages and delivery trucks. The residents mostly ignored the three Stable ponies aside from an occasional wave as they walked past the farms, and finally out into the wilderness beyond. The highway still ran off towards the south, brown and yellow weeds forcing their way through cracks in the asphalt. To either side of the road lay woods, the trees mostly dead and blackened, bare limbs clawing at the oppressive gray sky. “Alright, I take it back,” Sparks said, breaking their silence. “Now is the time for melancholy.” Rubble snorted. “It could be worse, I suppose. Nothing’s on fire, or shooting at us.” She blinked as a pair of red bars popped into her vision, slightly off to the right from the road. “You just had to say something, didn’t you,” Dulcimer teased. They crept to the top of the next hill, hoofsteps sounding loud enough to alert the farmers miles behind them. In the ditch off to the side were a pair of wrinkled pink creatures digging in the dirt. “Well, that’s not so bad.” Hearing the words, both of them turned, sniffing at the air before charging up the hill. Rubble leaped out in front of her friends, letting the lead beast charge right onto her bayonet, vicious rodent incisors snapping impotently inches from her muzzle as its blood poured over the road and her hooves. A pair of zarks from Sparks’ beam pistol finished off the second one. “Stable ponies one, creepy mutant wildlife zero,” Rubble declared. Shaking off the corpse of the beast, they rolled them into the ditch and continued on their way. As the day grew closer towards noon, the breeze picked up, the chill spring wind sending shivers through their bodies. They stopped for lunch at a Donut Joe’s just off the highway, brushing rubble off the chairs and a table and pulling out packages of salad. “At least we’ll have fresh food for a while,” Sparks said before faceplanting into his lunch, crunching loudly on a slice of cucumber. “Yeah. Dad said that the villagers even eat meat to supplement their crops.” Rubble’s expression matched her friends’. “I mean, I guess it’s not impossible for us to eat meat, but still, it sounds disgusting.” She chomped on a celery stick and idly kicked a hoof under the table. “Hey, quit playing hoofsie,” Dulcimer complained. Rubble stared at her for a moment, then over at Sparks. “Dulce, my hoof didn’t even come close to you.” The unicorn paled, then kicked again. A cockroach the size of her head came tumbling out from under the table, hissing in pain. A whole chorus of hissing joined in, and their vision lit up with red bars from the direction of the swinging kitchen door. “Oh, horseapples,” Rubble said. Her baton came out as a horde of cockroaches flooded out from the kitchen, some of them bursting through the crumbling drywall. The submachine gun chattered away to her left, and Sparks leapt up on a table to slice them in half with his pistol. Rubble just settled for swinging the baton rapidly back and forth, jabbing with her bayonet where the opportunity presented itself. In only a minute or two, the insect menace was vanquished. The only casualties were their unfinished salads, now covered in splatters of cockroach innards. “Suddenly, I’m not feeling particularly hungry,” Sparks said, shoving his food onto the floor. Nodding in agreement, Rubble gave the place a last once-over. Feeling nervous, she trotted over to the kitchen door and nudged it open with a hoof, letting the squeaky hinge bring out any last stragglers. When nothing responded, she ducked inside, wrinkling her nose at the sour stench of the roach hive, and picked up two bottles of Sparkle Cola on the top shelf. “Well, that was exciting,” she said. “Let’s keep going.” The afternoon stretched out almost exactly like the morning, only slightly warmer as the bright patch of clouds slowly slid towards the horizon on their right. Not wanting to camp in the open, they pressed on until it had almost vanished, finally finding a gas station along the side of the highway. The roof had almost completely collapsed, but a few minutes with PipBuck lights and a pair of cracked roof timbers was all Rubble needed to shore it up long enough to serve as shelter. None too soon, either, as rain began to slowly patter down from the clouds. They crowded into the building, huddling together for warmth and staring out into the nearly complete darkness. ---- Rubble awakened in the darkness, a hoof pressed over her mouth. She fought the urge to twitch as she brought up one of her own, following it back to its owner, guessing from the size that Sparks had awakened her. She was about to whisper a question when a crunch outside made her twitch in surprise. A blink was all it took to turn her EFS back on. A cluster of red bars filled her vision outside, and she leaned forward to peer past the half-collapsed doorframe as best she could. To her surprise, they were rather easy to find, as two of the ponies were carrying torches, and at least two more were unicorns with weapons levitating. “They were here, they were here,” one of them cried out. “Luna, reveal them so we might send them to your embrace!” Oh no, more fanatics, Rubble thought. But how did they find us out here? She turned her head to whisper something to Sparks, only to find yet another group of red bars off to the side of the building. Reaching over, she used one hoof to turn his head to both groups of bars. Now that she knew they were there, she could hear the quiet clink and scrape as this new group of ponies crept around the side of the building towards the fanatics. “Remember, take out the stallions and try not to kill any of the mares. They’re worth more.” She shuddered, hearing this group’s leader mutter to his companions. Two more minutes of agonizing waiting crept by, one long second after another, as the fanatics milled about under the highway underpass. Their light was faint enough, but they appeared to be ransacking a campsite. The raiders, or slavers, or whoever the more vicious ponies were, crept across the mostly barren shoulder of the farming road towards the fanatics. When she thought they were out of sight, Rubble nudged both of her companions. “We’ve got a good chance here,” she said. “Chance to get away?” Sparks asked. “Because I agree. We’re lucky those other ponies weren’t home when we got here, or they would have been capturing us.” “No, a chance to take out both groups. We stay back in the darkness and shoot at them,” Rubble said. “As long as you two don’t use your horns, they won’t know that anyone else is shooting at them. Both fanatics and those evil ponies will think it’s just the other side.” “Are you insane?” Sparks asked. Dulcimer shook her head. “I don’t like it, but I think she’s right. Whichever group survives is still going to want to kill us, or enslave us.” She pulled out her submachine gun and set it at her hooves. “But I’m not as good shooting with my mouth.” “You’re still better than she is,” Sparks muttered. “Fine. Just hope we can kill them all without having to get too close.” Rubble nodded. “I’m going to sneak just outside the doors. In case they do find us, that way I can hold them off.” One slow step after another, she crawled outside, every shift of her muscles expecting one of the raiders to turn around. As she reached the outside and stepped sideways, they struck. Three fanatics fell immediately to the gunfire, but they still outnumbered the smaller group of raiders. But the raiders were more used to this kind of combat, remaining hidden in the scrub brush and the darkness, moving just enough with each shot to keep the fanatics from tracking the muzzle flashes. Rubble took several deep breaths, carefully lining up on one of the red bars that marked a raider. She couldn’t see him now, but that hardly mattered. She bit down on the trigger, feeling the gun kick as the red bar vanished. Two more fanatics died under gunfire before one of them thrust a machete through the neck of another raider. With a zark, one of the raiders screamed as her eyeball flashboiled in her head. “Behind us!” one of them screamed, ducking and cursing as a submachine gun burst wounded him. Rubble took aim again, grazing a fanatic with a shotgun right after he blew the leg off a raider. The next blast of buckshot spattered the building around her and rattled off her barding. Trapped between the fanatics and the three Stable ponies, the last raider died cursing Luna’s name. The shovel wielding fanatic who bashed his head in choked on his own blood as a beam shot tore open his throat. The last three fanatics seemed to have at least some grasp of self-preservation as they ducked behind the concrete pillars of the overpass, firing blindly into the darkness. Rubble crept forward, holding her fire and letting the fanatics waste their ammunition firing at her companions. Alright, she wasn’t the quietest pony around, but they were distracted. Reaching the body of one of the fanatics, she pulled the machete out of his mouth with a grimace and picked it up. Ten more steps. Then five. Two. Restraining the urge to scream in challenge, she lunged around the side of the pillar, thrusting grimly with the machete. The unfortunate fanatic tried to turn, catching the blade evenly between the ribs and dropping the gun as her chest filled with blood. Her body jerked on the blade as the other fanatic turned and opened fire. Rubble pulled back, dropping the body and the machete as she cowered behind the pillar herself, then a chatter of bullets and a thump heralded the end of the combat. She glanced around, seeing Dulcimer had come charging up the other side. “Thanks,” Rubble said, bending over to pull out the blade and wipe it clean. “I suppose we ought to salvage all the guns, right?” “Along with anything else,” Sparks said. He stared at the body of the raider leader, clad in metal spikes and leather straps. “Celestia, I don’t even want to search him with telekinesis, let alone touch him.” “Yeah. Let’s just search the campsite and take all the weapons. We’ll make one last sweep in the morning when the sun is up for anything we missed.” Rubble trotted over towards the overturned truck where the raiders had dwelled, picking out a pair of fading healing potions from beneath an overturned chair. The next morning, they gave one last quick sweep to pick up dropped ammunition, and walked back up the onramp to the highway. There was a sniper nest in a burned out car, complete with a rifle all but falling apart, and with their looting complete they turned again towards the south. Fillydelphia was still nearly eighty miles away. Every day they spent out here was one more day for the fanatics to regroup and attack their Stable, so with heavy hearts and determined hooves they trotted down the road towards what they hoped would be home.