Fallout: Equestria - Unburied

by BlueNinja

Chapter 4: Totally Rad, Baby

They slept until noon, waking as cloud-filtered sunlight came down through cracks in the roof. The rain stopped at some point during their sleep, and they awoke with shivering muscles from the damp. Leaving Dulcimer on the bed, the other two collected dead wood from outside, setting the wet branches aside and reducing a bookshelf to scraps. One of the raider knives was put to use carving out a circle of tattered carpet, letting them safely start their fire on the concrete foundation below.

Coughing fitfully, Dulcimer spent the rest of the day dozing on and off. “Just promise me that I’m never going to come that close to drowning again,” she begged at one point, eyes bloodshot and hollow from the memory.

Aside from a radroach crawling out of one wall, attracted by the light from the fire, their night passed uneventfully. Feeling more refreshed, they stepped outside into another gloomy spring morning, staring down the road to the south. Somehow the fire had indeed been halted, either by the sloping walls of the creek or by the rain, and the view of dead orchards were broken here and there by fields long since gone fallow.

They stopped for lunch in an abandoned bus, taking advantage of the shelter from the wind. “How far are we?” Dulcimer asked. One hoof scrubbed at the dark circles under her eyes.

“Thanks to our crazy run from the dogs, and then the fire, we’re actually about halfway to Fillydelphia now,” Sparks said, mumbling around his last daisy and sunflower sandwich. Swallowing a bite, he gestured towards the back of the bus. “Another forty miles and the road splits. Part of the highway circles around the city, and the rest goes in. We know they got hit by balefire bombs, so we can’t go too far inside the city without risking radiation poisoning.”

“I think we got enough of that swimming in that damn water,” Rubble said. “But we can’t stick too far on the outside either. That Ripper gang the bridge ponies mentioned operates somewhere around there.”

Both unicorns looked at her. “How do you figure? We didn’t exactly stop to interrogate them,” Sparks said. His sandwich wrapper crumpled up in his magic and flew forwards, bouncing off the cracked plastic trashcan and down the stairs. “Missed.”

“Well, it just goes to figure. They can’t take the radiation any more than we can, so they’ll be outside the danger area. But not too far, they need to be able to rob ponies trying to loot the ruins.” Rubble shrugged, crumpling her own wrapper in a hoof.

“I suppose that makes sense. So why should we risk the radiation?” Sparks asked.

“No, I think I get it,” Dulcimer said. “We have some anti rad medicine, even if Rubble cut up the bottles. When we see signs of the gang, we head into the radiation area just far enough to get past them. Plus maybe we can find some good stuff along the way.” She shrugged as they turned to stare at her. “I’m just saying, I don’t think this Confederacy is going to help us for free.”

Rubble sighed. “No, probably not. But not everyone in the Wasteland can be bad. Right?” She glanced between her friends. Sparks looked doubtful, while Dulcimer just snorted. “Alright fine, maybe they can, but I’m still holding out hope.” Her wrapper went flying towards the trash can, knocking it loose and sending it tumbling down the stairs.

It took her a moment to identify what was underneath it, but her hissed warning did make her friends freeze. Crouching down as close to the floor as she could, she crept forward slowly through the dust. A convenient advertisement for an amusement park somewhere was bitten by her teeth, and she inched it forward until she could slip the corner into a tiny gap on the top of the mine. Only then did she relax, slumping to the floor before dragging the explosive to her and tearing off a strip to insert properly.

“OK, now that you’re done being all secret agent like, what is that?” Dulcimer asked, peering over the seat.

One gray hoof lifted it up. “This is an anti-personnel mine. Dad has a dozen or so in the armory at home. And a trainer one. I got pretty good at disarming the practice one after a while.” After double-checking the paper strip, she slid the mine into her saddlebags, setting her inventory management spell to keep it separate.

“Well, that’s handy, I suppose,” Sparks said, sliding out of his seat with an uneasy look. “Just try not to blow yourself up, right?”

She glared at him for a moment before stomping off the bus. Squinting up at the bright spot in the clouds, she started walking, smiling as her friends bickered over which one was getting off the bus first.

---===---

They spent that night in an overturned delivery trailer, the inside filled with half-moldy mattresses and comfortable enough. An hour after dawn, they stopped on the top of a hill, clambering over a fallen sign and the rusted mass of a dozen wrecked vehicles.

Below them to the east lay the ruins of Fillydelphia. Skyscrapers clawed at the sky, one of them leaning drunkenly against a neighboring building. On one part of the city a roller coaster stretched above the apartment buildings around it. Three craters, still glowing from the power of the bombs, lit up the haze surrounding the city with an eldritch green light, and several columns of smoke rose from different portions of the urban sprawl.

“Well. Suddenly I’m glad Gramps decided to take that promotion out of Filly,” Dulcimer said, wide eyes fixed on one of the craters. “I think over there were the main factories.” Her shaking hoof pointed towards the crater nearest the amusement park.

Rubble just nodded silently and started climbing down the multi vehicle wreck. Glancing down the other road, she led them towards the city. Before they reached the suburbs, they were forced to detour, as the highway had crumbled into weed-choked piles of cement blocks and rusting vehicles. The suburbs were filled with the quiet sounds of insects and animals, all of them apparently hostile to ponykind.

Their path was also slowed by Dulcimer’s compulsive need to walk through every house and store that looked even remotely structurally sound. By noon, they had covered only a mile through the suburbs, starting to close in on the denser buildings of the city, and yet had found only a hooffull of caps, two bottles of soda, and three rounds of ammunition too small for any of their weapons.

A little grumpy, Rubble sat down on a bus stop bench, the metal worn and rusted. She pulled out the last of her fresh food from the Stable, and stared at the slightly wrinkled carrot and potato a little wistfully. “I thought we’d get there before we ran out of food,” she said.

Sparks sat on the curb, leaning against a bullet-pocked mailbox and pulling out his own lunch. “I think everyone expected we’d be able to find more food along the way.” He stared around, the wide boulevard seemingly empty except for them and several overly amorous mosquitoes.

Dulcimer opened her mouth to say something, frowning and leaning back and forth. “There’s someone over there in that apartment building,” she said, slipping her own lunch back into her bags.

Turning towards the tiny shopping building, Rubble shrugged. “I don’t see anything on mine.”

Sparks frowned, taking a few steps towards it while chewing on his apple. “No, she’s right.” He glanced back at her. “I think I should network our PipBucks together. You know, so we can all see what everyone else does. In case of situations like this.”

With food stowed again and weapons ready, they moved towards the building. A grocery store, the entire front collapsed, took up the opposite corner from their bus station. Attached to it along one wall was a florist, then a repair shop with a small parking lot. Halfway across the intersection the yellow bar winked into view for Rubble and they spread out slightly.

The florist door was cracked open, the interior covered in dead, brown, crumbling plants, clearly empty. Dulcimer motioned towards the repair shop. The small door facing the street was blocked from the inside by a set of metal shelves, glass shattered out of the door. Rubble crept around the corner, watching the yellow bar sliding aside in her vision. The rolling door was blocked partway open by a skycycle, and she paused at the entrance, trying to let her eyes adjust to the light.

A small whimper echoed through the garage, making it difficult to pinpoint. One hoof at a time, she crawled under the door, pausing as a faint red light emerged under one of the cars. A slip of paper took care of that problem, and the rusty bear trap just past it was easy to disarm by tossing an empty tin can at it. The yellow bar was straight in front of her, past the peeling door labeled ‘Office.’

There was another bear trap, this one closed around a clump of pony tail hair, but the door was partially open. She nudged it a little bit, the almost pitch black retreating slightly. A pair of eyes glinted in the darkness, but since they still weren’t hostile, Rubble nudged her PipBuck. Harsh yellow light flooded the office, making the other pony flinch back as far as she was able.

“Sparks! We need a medic in here!” Rubble stepped forward, stopping as the trapped pony yanked out a knife in her mouth, waving it around weakly. “Look, calm down, I’m going to open that trap and my friend can heal you up.” She took another step forward, watching the scrawny yellow mare waver on her three good legs, the knife still firm between her teeth. One more step put her within reach of the bear trap, clearly too strong for the unfortunate scavenger to open.

Bracing her hooves between the jagged teeth, she strained for a moment, pushing against the spring and bending down the jaws until they clicked back into place. Yanking her injured leg back, the other mare fell onto her haunches, sagging to the floor.

Sparks was already there, his horn glowing as he examined the wound. “This isn’t good. It’s already infected, and badly. Have you been here long?” The mare opened her mouth, but no sounds emerged. He looked over, flinching at the sight of her tongue before she snapped her mouth closed. “Alright. I’m going to cast a healing spell, but it’s not powerful enough to fix all this damage.”

She sighed as the spell took effect, shrinking the inflamed red lines creeping up and down her leg from the wound. “Alright, so I’m guessing you can’t talk?” Sparks asked, rewarded with a somber head shake. “Is there anywhere safe around here? Somewhere with medical supplies? I might be able to treat that, but not without better stuff than I can find here.”

The yellow mare didn’t answer at first, retrieving her knife and sliding it back into a leg sheath. Rising gingerly onto her three good legs, she started limping towards the door. “Look, if this place is far away, maybe I should carry you,” Rubble said, getting an annoyed look.

Their path took them through another mile and a half of city in a winding path, avoiding piles where businesses and apartment buildings had collapsed to block the roads, stopping several times to allow the poor mare to rest. When they turned the final corner she sped up, towards a warehouse building. Two ponies were on the roof near the entrance, pointing rifles in their direction, and the warehouse walls had been reinforced by stacks of cars pushed up against the building.

Reaching the door, she rapped out a pattern, and it opened to reveal bulky stallion the color of bricks, no taller than a colt. “Juni! You’re alive!” He took her in a hug, releasing immediately as she hissed in pain.

“She needs medical care,” Sparks said, stepping forward. “We found her stuck in a bear trap, and it’s been long enough for infection to set in. I might be able to treat it, if you have the supplies.”

Before the stallion could respond, Juni sat back on her haunches and made several gestures with her uninjured leg. The fierce scowl didn’t abate, but it did fade somewhat. “My name’s Brickhouse. Thank you for saving my sister. I don’t know what we can give you for supplies, but if it’ll help, we’ll do what we can.”

“The name’s Sparks, and these are Dulcimer and Rubble,” the unicorn said, gesturing to his companions. “The leg needs to be treated soon. If it goes too long, she might die.”

Brickhouse led them inside. It was dim, light coming in streams from broken windows near the ceiling. A dozen ponies stopped what they were doing, all looking over at the newcomers and the return of Juni. Halfway down the warehouse they stopped near a collection of mattresses behind a homemade still. “Here, Juni, lay down. So what do you need?”

Sparks waved one hoof in a hold on gesture, kneeling down beside her again and casting another diagnostic spell. They waited in silence, broken only by the quiet hoofsteps of the other scavengers coming closer to watch and listen.

His blue head drooped as the yellow glow of his magic faded away. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said quietly. “If the infection was just in the muscle tissue, it’d be curable, though dangerous. But it’s gotten into her bone.” He looked up, shaking his head to clear his mane out of his eyes. “I have to amputate, from the fetlock down. If I’m lucky, it won’t have spread anywhere else in her body.”

Brickhouse’s eyes shimmered, and his lips wavered for a moment until he clamped them together. “Tell me what you need.”

“How pure is the alcohol in that still?”

“Hundred twenty proof, I think. Whitey could tell you exactly.”

Sparks nodded. “Good. I’m going to need a clean sheet, wash it in alcohol. Bandages, a sharp blade and a saw,” he said, rattling off everything he would need.

---===---

Four hours later, the sleeping Juni lay with a bandaged stump propped up on a pile of pillows brought in by the scavengers. Sparks lay beside her, eyes slitted open as he rested. “Thank you for this,” Brickhouse told Rubble, as the two sat some distance away. “I don’t know what we can do to make it up.”

She smiled faintly. “Meeting you guys actually gives us a pretty good average on friendly ponies in the Wasteland. If you know the city well, we wouldn’t say no to having a guide. We’re trying to get south, to someplace called the Confederacy, but we’ve heard about bad gangs around here, not to mention the radiation.”

He laughed, a hollow and mirthless sound which even quiet felt like it filled the cavernous space. “The gangs, the rads, the ghosts. Filly’s a deadly place.” He stared off into space. “But it’s home now.”

Rubble stared at him. “Ghosts? Really?”

Grinning, Brickhouse nodded as he stretched out on the floor. “They’re real. Glowing forms of ponies, obliterated by the bombs, that can still strike back at you with the damned light of their souls.” He ran a hoof down his barrel over a long, straight scar. “Like this.”

She stared at the old, healed wound for a moment. “Alright, I know I’ve already found bugs the size of my head, but still, that seems awfully hard to swallow.”

He shrugged. “Believe me or not. Mostly they stay around the craters. Well, actually, they mostly stay around the old university, since it’s between two of the balefire craters. We try not to go there too often, but pretty soon the irradiated areas will be all that’s left to get salvage.” He dropped his head onto his forehooves, staring at the fading light from the western windows.

“Why haven’t you tried to go somewhere safer?” Rubble asked, looking around as everyone started settling in for the night. Sparks had started drooling in his sleep, and Dulcimer floated one of the scavenger’s tattered blankets over him before claiming another mattress nearby.

He snorted. “Where? Too many gangs to move to the countryside. Couple of us tried your confederacy, but they were born here. The radiation does funny things to you if you’re conceived in it.” He pointed over to where Whitey was setting up in another corner. The albino unicorn had actually started glowing faintly in the darkness, dimmer than a torch or a PipBuck light but easily visible across the room.

Rubble sighed, laying her own head down and also sighing. “That makes me wonder if they’ll actually be as welcoming as we hope.”

“I bet you’ll be fine. You and your friends are perfectly healthy.” Brickhouse gestured to his own squat frame. “Not freaks like most of us are.”

“You don’t seem like a freak. You’re just short,” she said with a smile.

“Uh-huh,” he replied, obviously unimpressed. “And what about Whitey? Or Juniper? It’s not an injury, she was born with her vocal cords and tongue not formed right.”

“It’s, well, um. Alright, Whitey’s a little weird,” she admitted, glancing over at the glowing head, everything else buried beneath blankets. “But it’s not his fault, right?”

Brickhouse grunted. “It got worse the last time he went into one of the craters. Used to be he was just obvious. Never goes out at night if he can help it, of course. But like the rest of us, he was born that way.”

Her eyes stayed fixed on the pale white glow, the only source of light in the building now. “So why didn’t the Confederacy want him?”

“Because he’s a freak. They can’t stand the thought of what might happen if we joined their cities and actually started having kids, if that’s even possible,” he growled. “They want everything to go back to how it was before the war. No radiation, no monsters, no zebras, no freaks.” He spat off to one side.

She lay there in the silence and the blackness, considering his words. It was possible it was all just a misunderstanding, but it might also be their policy. Even then, Rubble could think of a dozen Stable ponies who wouldn’t be terribly accepting either, starting with the Overmare. It might not be the best place to settle down after all.

But what other choice did she have? They couldn’t move into the ruins. The radiation would finish off whoever the raiders didn’t, and that wasn’t even counting the so-called ghosts. Setting up on their own would be the same story, just like Brass said. There were other Stables, but 92 had been one of the largest ones built, and they couldn’t just evict the current residents.

“Thanks for the information,” she whispered, closing her eyes as Brickhouse started snoring. It was a problem for tomorrow, when they’d have to continue their journey.

---===---

The next morning, Sparks left Juni with a strict set of instructions on cleaning the wound site, and verified that she could actually remove the stitches herself when the time came. While he was giving her a clean bill of health, Rubble and Dulcimer sat outside the front doors with Brickhouse and Whitey, looking at an old street map of Fillydelphia, covered in scribbles of pencil and crayon.

“So, if we go through here, we should be safe,” Dulce said, her hoof tracing a route only a street or two over from the amusement park.

“Long as you’re quiet. The Rippers do swing through that area sometimes, and the rads can get mighty fierce,” Whitey said. “But your other way is heading out of the city here, between the Rippers and the Fiends, and going twenty miles out of your way.”

“Over here, there’s a couple of markets. We haven’t gotten to them, because of how close they are to the Fiends, but there might still be food in there.” Brickhouse grinned, lifting the pistol now strapped to his foreleg. “Still, I think we made a fair trade.”

Rubble was tapping it all into her PipBuck, marking off the areas. Sparks would be able to download it from her, and then they would hopefully avoid the worst of the raiders. “Thanks for all of the advice.”

“Advice is free. Besides, you freed my sister from dying of thirst or disease. It’s the least we can do.” Brickhouse extended a hoof, shaking with both Rubble and Dulcimer, and finally Sparks as he exited.

“We’ll try to swing back through on our way north, if we can,” he said. “I’ll want to check on her. Once it heals, she should be able to use a prosthetic.”

“A what?” Whitey asked, blinking several times.

“A fake limb,” Dulcimer said, cutting off the other unicorn.

The albino grinned. “Oh, alright. That’s good. She’s one of our best for finding food. Like she just knows where the plants are still growing in the city.”

Brickhouse glared at the other scavenger. “She does, Whitey. It’s even her cutie mark.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.” He kept grinning, rolling up the map and trotting back inside.

Shaking his head, the red scav leader grinned. “He’s an idiot, but he’s got his uses. You three watch out on your way through the city, you hear?”

Rubble smiled back. “We will.” She held up her own fetlock, where a crossbow was strapped opposite her PipBuck. “And you’re right, I think it’s a good trade.”

They gave a last wave to the guards on the roof before sliding deeper into the city. Howls from the wind echoed through the street from the crumbled buildings, shadows stark and deep and cold. Gunshots could be heard, their source lost in the urban maze. They crept along as cautiously as they could. The markets were only three miles away, in a straight line, but the wreckage of the war turned that into more than five miles through an obstacle course of rusting metal and crumbling concrete.

At the top of one pile of concrete, climbable with some difficulty, Rubble froze. At the bottom was a pony, dressed in metal scraps and spikes tied together with leather thongs. She had been quiet, or mostly quiet, but the ganger was staring right at her. “Thought I heard something, probably a roach,” the ganger said, turning around and trotting towards a second one a block away, standing in front of the grocery stores that were their destination.

“Hope it comes out, they’re good eating,” the other one replied, rattling the door. “Damnit, this one’s locked too.”

“Break the window?” The first one suggested, pulling a nail-studded baseball bat from her back.

“It’s got bars on the inside. Let’s try the next one.” They turned, walking back towards a shrinking Rubble. But somehow, neither of them looked up at the pile of concrete, their subconscious accepting her gray pelt and black barding as part of the wreckage.

“What’s happening?” Dulcimer hissed from behind her. It was lost in the wind as the pair of raiders entered the store, the bell above the door jingling merrily for a moment before the baseball bat smashed it off the wall.

Rubble instantly ducked down. “Raiders, two of them. They said two of the stores are locked, and they just went into the third one.”

“We should wait here,” Sparks said. “They can’t take that long, and Dulce can get us into the locked stores I bet.”

“These guys are raiders, they kill ponies,” Dulcimer argued. “We can take them out now, when they’re not expecting it. If they find us out here, they will kill us. The only question is whether or not they get their buddies first.”

Rubble tuned out the bickering as Sparks hissed a complaint about her bloodthirsty attitude, and raised her head enough to see the store. The door had been propped open with something, and she couldn’t hear the two gang members inside. Hoping she wasn’t going to regret it, she lifted herself back over the top, freezing for a moment as a cascade of concrete gravel clattered down the pile and into the street.

Still no response came from the store, so she crept across the street. Rags tied around her hooves muffled the sound of her steps, and just outside the door she paused again. They were somewhere in the back, arguing over something. As she snuck inside the door, the baseball bat smashed something to pieces. “Fuck, just bits!”

“Hey, better than nothing. Sides, we got two cereal boxes and a one of mash, so least we won’t go hungry.” Rubble ducked behind the next set of shelves as they started for the door, stepping carefully around the scattered empty cans and bottles to come around behind them.

As the gangers stepped out into the morning sunlight, they froze. Dulcimer’s submachine gun was pressed to the head of the unicorn ganger, while the laser pistol hovered back far enough cover both of them. “Hi. Drop your weapons,” Dulcimer said, grinning broadly.

The earth pony ganger immediately whirled around, the first laser shot going over his head, and impaled himself on Rubble’s bayonet. The unexpected impact sent her skidding backwards on her plot, blood spraying on her as he twisted in pain on her weapon. This isn’t how things were supposed to go, she thought bleakly. A burst of fire echoed from the surrounding buildings.

Shoving the body free, she stepped over him and looked down at the corpse of the unicorn. “Was that necessary?” she asked quietly.

“She tried to knock it aside and go for her weapon,” Dulcimer said.

Sparks swallowed heavily, not looking at the ruin of what had been a pony’s head. “Baseball bat versus submachine gun is so fair,” he muttered. “Look, can we just get their stuff and go?”

“That’s a good idea,” Rubble said, glancing down the street. “Just in case any of them heard the shots.” The golden bits, slightly beat up, were already sliding into Dulcimer’s bags along with the bat and another machete.

The next store, when Dulcimer finally opened the lock two agonizing minutes later, proved to be nearly fully stocked. The bottom shelves of boxes were lost, destroyed by rodents at some point, but the higher two shelves proved out of mousey reach. Fortified with three dozen boxes of pre-war food, a dozen bottles of soda, plus the additional sack of bits from this cash register, they snuck out the back door into the refuse-choked alley. The neighboring store had a mere two cans in the way of food, but it did have a sawed-off shotgun under the counter that Dulcimer happily claimed.

Emerging into the morning haze, they could hear ganger ponies shouting angrily in the street. They looked around for an escape, since one end of the alley was blocked by trash and the other led back out close enough for them to be seen.

Sparks pointed upwards. The other side of the alley was a building, some business or apartment that stretched five stories tall, and directly above them was an open window. He pointed towards a closed dumpster, then the roof of the grocery, then at the window. Rubble considered it as an escape route. Sure, the two unicorns could make it easily, they were both more agile than she was, and lighter. She could probably make the jump too, if she could get a bit of a running start.

Of course, that would alert the gangers. They knew the area better than three wandering Stable ponies, so if there was another entrance to the building, they might get cut off. But they’d passed the front entrance, buried under that concrete pile, so they might just go straight through the building and out the other side to another roof and then to the ground.

Nodding, she led the way to the dumpster, hoping the rag-muffled clangs wouldn’t draw the ganger’s attention already. Her leap onto the roof was not so fortunate, as the sliding gravel and trash caught somepony’s attention. It would take them a little bit to break down one of the locked doors and get into the alley. Hopefully that would be enough time.

Backing halfway across the roof, Rubble faced the window. Galloping forward, she leaped into the air, barely clearing the window frame and tumbling into the office, toppling over a cubicle wall before she came to a halt. “I give it a six point five.”

Rubble looked up, eyes wide. Standing above her was a glowing pony. Burnt and melted flesh drooped from the face, and she could see two ribs. A shock of orange and yellow mane stood up in a Mohawk cut, and a beam rifle lay strapped to one side, the emitter seeming far too close to her face.

“You might want to run. The Fiends like to take their prisoners alive. It’s not pretty,” the melted pony said. “Oh, and remember, you never saw me.” With an arrogant wink, she vanished into a shimmer of air that was gone the next time Rubble blinked.

Dulcimer came flying through the air a moment later, landing on all four hooves and stopping next to her friend. “C’mon, let’s go!” she said.

Sparks hit the window frame, smacking into the floor. With blood leaking from his nose, they helped him up and clattered across the building. They could hear random bullets striking the building, fired blindly by the furious gangers and fading away as they jumped out the opposite side of the building, landing on a bus, and from there to the ground.

By the time the Fiends circled around to the other side of the building, they were long gone.

Author's Note:

Level up! Level 5!

Rubble skill marker: Melee 100!

Sparks skill marker: Energy Guns 110!

(But wait, I hear you cry, skills only go to 100! Well, actually, that's not true in FO1&2 - they can go up as high as 300%.)

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

Is this dead? Are you dead? When does Sunset Shimmer appear?

[BlueNinja]

5166399 Um ... yeah, this is pretty dead. I was never happy with the stuff I was rewriting, and my plan to add Sunset Shimmer as a ghoul wouldn't have appeared for a few chapters anyway.

[StormyVenture]

Skills at 100 by level 5 seems a bit over the top.

[uis]

Where is Sunshim?